mikedilger on Nostr: According to the view of Mike Benz (who I've recently discovered), the US government ...

According to the view of Mike Benz (who I've recently discovered), the US government was pro free speech until 2014. Free speech and things like Tor helped America to topple governments around the world, by subverting the views of their citizenry via free speech. I thought that was perfectly OK to do, as long as they were just convincing those citizens that democracy and human rights were worth fighting for (without dirty tricks) and those citizens then overthrew their oppressive government to get democracy and free speech.

But since 2014 things took a major turn against free speech. Crimea, through free speech, discovered the CIA coup and decided they didn't want to be involved in this new Western government, and did a counter-coup with the assistance of Russia which ended up in Russia annexing Crimea. The US was not pleased. They changed their policy going forward. Now speech couldn't be free, speech had to be aligned with US goals or else the US would find reasons to censor or block it. The election of Trump and Brexit just hardened their resolve.

So Tor is not quite so welcome anymore, and I wouldn't be suprised if it gets shut down exactly as you describe.