Executive Director for Foundation for Freedom Online, Mike Benz, and U.S. virologist and self-proclaimed inventor of mRNA technology, Dr. Robert Malone, joined Daily Caller Editor-in-Chief Amber Duke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday to discuss online censorship in the West.
Benz and Malone sat down with the Caller’s Duke to analyze the European Union’s (E.U.) Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires content moderation on certain online platforms. The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, released the second of two reports in February detailing how the E.U. used the DSA to effectively export censorship to the U.S. and around the world, infringing on Americans’ First Amendment protections.
While E.U. officials present the act as a neutral safety and illegal content regulation, it functions as a tool that requires Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) to censor lawful political discourse, disinformation, “hate speech”, and “systemic risks,” according to the report.
The Committee’s new report shows how European regulatory pressure and the EU’s Digital Services Act directly harm American online speech in the U.S.
Give it a read: https://t.co/qJ540c7g5X https://t.co/UW4s0hTV6R
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) February 4, 2026
This report argues that the DSA is the culmination of a ten-year systematic campaign by the European Commission to pressure platforms into altering their global content moderation rules. Because these platforms apply uniform global policies to avoid massive fines, which can be up to 6 percent of global annual revenue, the E.U. has been able to control speech in the U.S. and other countries. It claims the Commission successfully censored “true information and political speech” on major policy debates, including the COVID-19 pandemic, mass immigration, and transgender issues, while operating largely in secret. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
The House Judiciary Committee report states that more than 100 closed-door meetings have occurred since around 2020, during which platforms were encouraged to tighten rules in ways that affected users worldwide.
Benz is a former U.S. State Department official under the first Trump administration and a prominent critic of online censorship. Duke asked Benz to explain the censorship industrial complex that operates worldwide.
“The censorship industrial complex, which is government, private sector, nonprofits, and media all working together to pull their own levers in order to achieve that censorship state. It came about really in significant part because Donald Trump won the 2016 election, and something called the First Amendment of the United States Constitution stood in the way,” Benz said.
“To end run the First Amendment instead of having the government directly put its finger on the trigger, they would use essentially a public-private partnership model to have university centers, NGOs, nonprofits, foundation grantees, and government grantees do the dirty work for the government,” he continued. “And what that ended up resulting in was a very serious push by informed citizens, by the hearts and minds of the American people and allies across the seas, and the election of Donald Trump to scale back an incredible amount of that infrastructure at the NGO layer that resulted in the closure of USAID functionally.”
Benz said the Trump administration’s work on downsizing the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) effectively “shut down the State Department’s global engagement center,” which “resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of censorship grants being cut to the NGOs.”
He warned that the problem isn’t going away. While the Trump administration has done a lot of work to clean out the censorship apparatus in the U.S., the “censorship class in exile are not out of jobs.”
“They’ve simply gotten jobs in Europe with the EU, and that remains at this stage, in my view, the main theater of battle,” Benz said, adding that he has begun working with the Trump administration “on a transparency drive about the nature of those NGOs so that the American people can have more visibility about what they’ve been paying for to create it in the first place.”
The Daily Caller’s Editor-in-Chief @ambermarieduke hosts a panel at CPAC on censorship in America and around the world.
Watch the full segment below 👇 pic.twitter.com/7aAxMn2mrE
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 27, 2026
Malone, who was censored during the pandemic for speaking out about the COVID-19 vaccine, told Duke that while the Trump administration is tackling the U.S.’s censorship apparatus, Americans still have to worry about what is being done in Europe through the DSA.
“Because of the nature of all these companies are globalized, what happens in Europe doesn’t stay in Europe. It gets deployed here in the United States, and so we have in, in the case of the Digital Services Act,” Malone said.
“All of this infrastructure, including the non-governmental organizations that are empowered to essentially identify speech that should be by their determination blocked, that becomes functionally blocking in the United States also. The standards and policies are implemented in the European Union; they will be implemented in the United States,” Malone added. (ROOKE: Heroic Farmers Reject $26 Million Offer From Massive Company To Preserve American Legacy)
Duke spoke about how Tesla CEO Elon Musk was able to break the dam on online censorship for Americans, but warned that Big Tech companies operating in other parts of the world are subject to fines and possible jail time for failing to cooperate with the global censorship complex.
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