"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
For years, Benz has pushed a worldview rooted in antisemitic conspiracies, white identity politics, and Kremlin-friendly narratives.
A far-right racist conspiracy theorist who once claimed that “Hitler actually had some decent points” is now being welcomed as a thought leader by the U.S. Secretary of State. Michael Benz’s ideas—once confined to anonymous white nationalist forums—are now being cited to justify the dismantling of American institutions like the foreign aid agency USAID and the abolition of government departments designed to counter Russian and Iranian disinformation.
Benz — briefly a former mid-level communications official in Trump’s first State Department and the man behind the alt-right, racist, and antisemitic “Frame Game” persona — sat down last week for a State Department–endorsed conversation with Marco Rubio. During the extended interview, Benz praised Rubio’s decision to shutter the Global Engagement Center, the U.S. government’s only agency devoted to tracking foreign propaganda campaigns from authoritarian regimes like Russia and Iran. Rubio, for his part, credited Benz’s “vision” and reposted his approval on X.
For years, Benz has pushed a worldview rooted in antisemitic conspiracies, white identity politics, and Kremlin-friendly narratives. That worldview is now being treated not as a fringe delusion but as a basis for U.S. policy.
In the interview, Benz hailed the closure of the Global Engagement Center as a victory for “civil liberties.” He and Rubio echoed far-right talking points that paint anti-disinformation work as little more than censorship of conservative speech. The moment marked a stunning normalization of extremist ideology in mainstream governance. Benz, under his Frame Game alias, promoted the “Great Replacement” theory, Holocaust revisionism, and antisemitic claims that Jews secretly control the media. Once an anonymous avatar of the alt-right, Benz is now shaping decisions at the highest levels of American government.
Before being welcomed by the country’s top diplomat, Benz operated in the shadowy corners of the alt-right internet. As “Frame Game,” he published screeds on “Jewish influence in the West,” spoke of “White Genocide,” and described Hitler as having made “some decent points.” His commentary blended antisemitic tropes with Kremlin-aligned propaganda, pushing the idea that Jews orchestrated demographic shifts designed to eliminate white political power. In a video he said: "If you were to remove the Jewish influence on the West, white people would not face the threat of white genocide that they currently do." Even as he promoted these views, Benz, who is Jewish, insisted he was acting in defense of Jews—telling NBC News in 2023 that Frame Game was “a project by Jews to get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews.”
As Frame Game, Benz constructed a conspiratorial narrative in which global instability was the result of deliberate sabotage by a hidden elite. He claimed immigration policies, social movements, and even democratic uprisings were part of a grand plan orchestrated by Jews, the so-called “Deep State,” and billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Even while promoting these views, Benz styled himself as a free-speech champion—despite his rhetoric stoking hate and division.
Benz’s transformation from fringe agitator to policy influencer is built on a consistent alignment with the talking points emanating from Vladimir Putin's regime. He has long portrayed the 2014 Maidan uprising in Ukraine as a U.S.-orchestrated coup and likened it to what he called the “U.S. Jan. 6-ing” of Ukraine. In this framing, the violent January 6, 2021, Capitol riot—a failed attempt to overturn the election of Joe Biden—is reimagined as a righteous populist revolt crushed by the state. By applying that lens to Ukraine, Benz denies Ukrainians any legitimate agency, casting their democratic movement as a Deep State coup exported by Washington. It’s an inversion that erases Russian culpability and recasts the U.S. as the aggressor.
This framework has been central to Benz’s campaign against the Global Engagement Center, which he has long attacked for documenting Russian propaganda. In April 2025, that campaign bore fruit: the Center was dismantled, removing the only federal entity that tracked precisely the kinds of foreign disinformation efforts that Benz himself has repeatedly echoed.
Benz’s early conspiratorial work centered heavily on George Soros. In his Frame Game content, Soros, who is Jewish, wasn’t just a powerful donor—he was cast as the archetype of the global puppet master, orchestrating everything from refugee flows to cultural “degeneracy.” Soros’s Open Society Foundations, in Benz’s telling, were fronts for an international plot to undermine national sovereignty and impose a borderless, multicultural order.
These accusations mirrored centuries-old antisemitic caricatures and fed directly into the far-right’s demonization of global institutions. While Benz now refrains from invoking Soros explicitly in formal settings, his ideological fingerprints are everywhere—in efforts to delegitimize development aid, academic exchanges, and democratic initiatives abroad.
One of Benz’s top targets in the Biden and now Trump II eras has been USAID. Once viewed as a pillar of American soft power, the agency has been rebranded in far-right discourse as an instrument of leftist manipulation. Benz has labeled USAID a “radical-left political psy op,” accusing it of interfering in foreign elections and destabilizing conservative governments. His rhetoric, spread on his online channels and in interviews with conspiracy theorists like far right pro-Kremlin broadcaster Tucker Carlson, has been amplified by influencers like Elon Musk in hundreds of X posts, and by senior officials in the current administration.
That framing has given political cover to Republican efforts to slash USAID’s budget and shutter many of its initiatives. Under Benz’s influence, the agency’s mission of supporting democracy and civil society abroad is recast as an insidious attempt to export progressive ideology.
By repackaging his conspiracy theories as public policy proposals, Benz has helped mainstream some of the most dangerous and mendacious ideas of the far-right conspiracy theorysphere. His early diatribes against immigrants, Jews, and democratic institutions—once confined to online fever swamps—now animate real-world policy. In Benz’s world, the collapse of American diplomatic credibility is not a tragedy—it’s a strategic goal.
That a man who once praised Hitler and championed Holocaust revisionism is now advising the U.S. Secretary of State is more than symbolic. It signals the transformation of American governance itself—one where anti-Western white nationalist conspiratorial ideas are not just tolerated but embraced at the highest levels.
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