This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Just days before the historic November 2016 election that, to the shock and horror of the Washington elite, made Donald Trump the 45th president of the United States and leader of the free world, the brash billionaire outsider spoke the most forbidden truth of all:

“There is nothing the political establishment will not do," he said, "and no lie they will not tell to hold on to their prestige and power at your expense. The Washington establishment, and the financial and media corporations that fund it, exists for only one reason: to protect and enrich itself.”

Today, almost eight years later, as America approaches a truly life-or-death-of-the-nation election, it is beset with a raft of huge and almost surreal crises – including a full-scale foreign invasion across America’s southern border, intentionally engineered by the irredeemably malevolent Biden administration. Then there’s the unprecedented and nakedly illegal mass lawfare campaign against Donald Trump in an effort to take him out of the coming election and cast him into prison. And there’s the rampant inflation and rapidly degrading economy. And the skyrocketing violent crime in all our major cities. And the mass-hysteria transgender movement seducing countless kids into being grievously mutilated surgically for life. And most recently, there’s the explosion of anti-Semitism across the country, courtesy of rage-fueled Marxist activists who, while knowing literally nothing about anything, pretend to care about “oppressed” populations around the world.

But wait, there’s still more.

Although it has only recently become clear, another extraordinary secret revolution has been unfolding right under everyone’s noses.

Before we get there, stop and consider the bizarre reality that not only President Donald Trump, but tens of millions of decent, law-abiding, America-loving citizens who intend to vote for him this November, somehow inspire unending dread, fear and loathing throughout the Washington, D.C., ruling class. That would include not only the ever-more-deranged Democratic Party and the entire “mainstream media” (today a virtual clone of the U.S.S.R’s pretend “news” organs Pravda and Izvestia, which published only official government propaganda), but also the “Deep State” itself, the permanent federal government bureaucracy that remains – and grows ever larger, like “The Blob” in the classic horror film – regardless of which party is currently “in power.”

One key component of this gargantuan permanent bureaucracy, operating largely outside of public view, has recently been dragged into the light, exposing its hidden but central role in the censorship and silencing of all who oppose the Deep State and its increasingly totalitarian agenda. That highly influential entity, about which most people know very little, is the federal defense/foreign-policy establishment widely referred to within the Capital Beltway simply as “the Blob.”

This massive bureaucracy headed up by the Central Intelligence Agency, explains Benz, literally funded and developed the amazing technology years ago that enabled internet free speech, then encouraged dissident groups worldwide to use that new free-speech capability to organize and network with other patriots and help them overthrow oppressive regimes. So far, so good.

Yet incredibly, says Benz, the CIA has in more recent times turned against the concept of free speech – at least, when it comes to what it considers dangerous and subversive groups within America. Some of the most “dangerous” populations include conservatives, Republicans, constitutionalists, “MAGA” Trump supporters and politically active Christians.

One of the chief pretexts for this suppression of domestic speech has been the claim that supposedly subversive domestic groups and individuals were spreading “Russian disinformation,” which of course was a key focal point for the years-long near-destruction of Donald Trump’s presidency. As it turned out, of course, the claim that Trump “colluded with the Russians” was not only definitively proven to be entirely false; it was created (and the damning “Trump dossier” actually paid for) by the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, who actually did collude big-time with the Russians. Nevertheless, the claim that Donald Trump somehow had been ushered into the presidency by Russia – and the corollary accusation that virtually anyone defending Trump was a “Putin ally” – not only defamed, but destroyed, good people for years.

Not just ‘Putin allies,’ but ‘domestic terrorists’ too

Normal Americans have long wondered how and why law-abiding citizens – including, for example, parents who would stand up and speak their minds at school board meetings to complain about teachers indoctrinating their children with Marxist propaganda – could possibly be maligned by the Biden administration as “violent extremists” and possible “domestic terrorists.” (Yes, that actually happened.)

A previously hidden dimension to this surreal spectacle of branding regular Americans as “terrorists” has now emerged, and it has to do with “the Blob.”

As previously noted, the vast foreign-policy establishment (Pentagon, CIA, State Department, etc.) seemingly was on the right track when promoting internet free speech to democratic resistance movements in other countries – perhaps the most memorable example being the “Arab Spring” in 2010-2012. Dissident groups were aided in throwing off tyrannical regimes by being enabled to communicate, strategize and organize via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Literally, internet free speech was helping freedom-loving peoples around the world throw off oppressive ruling regimes.

Sounds good, but even that didn’t always work out so well. William J. Burns, the current CIA director since 2021, took the time in 2020, when he was out of government, to write an article for The Atlantic headlined “The Blob Meets the Heartland,” in which he expressed some doubts and misgivings about what the agency had been doing:

For most of my three and a half decades as an American diplomat, the foreign-policy establishment (known unaffectionately in some quarters as “the blob”) took for granted that expansive U.S. leadership abroad would deliver peace and prosperity at home. That assumption was lazy, and often flawed.

Riding the waves of globalization and American geopolitical dominance, we overreached. We deluded ourselves with magical thinking about our capacity to remake other societies, while neglecting the urgent need to remake our own. Unsurprisingly, the disconnect widened between the Washington policy establishment and the citizens it is meant to serve.

Ironically, in light of Burns’ comment about “the citizens” whom the Washington policy establishment “is meant to serve,” it turns out that permanent Washington’s stateside activities took a pretty dark turn shortly before Donald Trump became president.

The Blob, which up until 2014 or 2015 had been targeting ISIS and other actual terror groups in foreign nations by facilitating the free speech and activism of freedom-loving dissident groups, somehow determined that within America itself, certain groups of people and certain ideas and speech – including being considered a conduit for “Russian disinformation” – were dangerous and needed to be suppressed, censored and thereby defeated.

So, when leftist elites today malign and degrade conservatives, Christians, Republicans, pro-lifers and MAGA folks as “violent extremists,” “domestic terrorists” or – as Biden called Trump and his supporters in a major speech, “semi-fascists” – this is not simply hyper-partisan election-year name-calling. Somehow, thoroughly decent and law-abiding American citizens, if they oppose the narratives and agendas of the Deep State, are now apparently regarded as the newest ISIS-type threat needing to be suppressed.

How can that possibly be? How can good people ridiculously be likened to “domestic terrorists”? What’s really behind the official government obsession with targeting for censorship large swaths of political and cultural views they label “misinformation,” “disinformation” and an Orwellian term that never before existed – “malinformation,” defined as truth that nevertheless causes harm?

It’s all because, according to the permanent government in Washington, all of this “mis-,” “dis-” and “mal”-information represents a huge threat to … “DEMOCRACY.”

But wait, rational people will respond: Democracy simply means the will of the people. The Oxford Dictionary defines democracy as “a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.” In fact, the word democracy itself derives from the Greek words “demos,” meaning people, and “kratos,” meaning power. Democracy is, and always has been, a system wherein the governing power depends on the will of the common people – which is precisely how Americans have always understood the term.

However, in today’s “1984”-style world where, as George Orwell wrote, “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” “Ignorance is strength” and everything means its opposite, “democracy” today has been given an entirely new and precisely opposite definition.

What the Deep State has determined, Benz explained to Tucker Carlson during their epic hour-long February interview on X, is that “preserving democracy” no longer has anything at all to do with enabling and honoring the will of America’s citizens/voters. Rather, it is all about preserving the sanctity of so-called “democratic institutions.”

“And who are the democratic institutions?” Benz asks rhetorically. “Oh, ‘it's us’! It's the military, it's NATO, it's the IMF and the World Bank. It's the mainstream media, it is the NGOs [non-governmental organizations]. And of course, these NGOs are largely State Department-funded or CIA-funded. It's essentially all of the elite establishments” that have felt threatened by “the rise of domestic populism,” Benz explained, and who have “declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy.”

So, “democracy,” concludes the State Department whistleblower, now consists of “getting the NGOs to agree with BlackRock, to agree with the Wall Street Journal, to agree with the community and activist groups who are onboarded with respect to a particular initiative. That is the difficult vote-building process.”

In light of this new official (but of course, unspoken) definition of democracy – which has literally nothing to do with the will of the people – it finally becomes clear what politicians from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to Chuck Schumer and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez really mean when they continually warn that Donald Trump and his tens of millions of law-abiding, taxpaying, America-loving supporters somehow “threaten our democracy.”

The key word is “our.”

In reality, of course, they loathe true democracy, the idea that “the rabble” might choose their own king, so to speak. In fact, a shocking new Rasmussen survey shows that when polled, more than two-thirds of America’s wealthiest and most politically engaged elites – 69% of them – admitted they would be willing to win an election by cheating. That kind of attitude and willingness to literally lie, cheat and steal one’s way into gaining and holding power, helps explain not only the entire “Trump-Russia collusion” hoax, which became a Deep State pretext for censoring all of Trump’s supporters, but also the continual and ever-expanding persecution and mass lawfare campaign directed at Donald Trump himself.

The Washington establishment being described here, which as Trump boldly proclaimed shortly before the 2016 election, will do literally anything “to hold on to their prestige and power at your expense,” obviously has nothing but contempt for actual democracy. Rather, these people openly champion political corruption, censorship, oppression, persecution and an utterly undemocratic ruling system – as long as it’s run by them.