“There is no genuine desire for public debate. They do not want to persuade society. Instead, they identify ‘change agents’ who carry the ideology directly into institutions—bypassing parents, parliament, and public opinion.”
“The youngsters in the protest demand changes. What changes, and who is best prepared to make them is a question with multiple different answers within the protest.”
Mike Benz was speechwriter for the Trump White House and Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Policy at the State Department in the first Trump administration. He founded the Foundation for Freedom Online in 2022 and became one of the key players exposing the ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’ after the release of the Twitter Files. The European Conservative spoke to Mike Benz at the Westminster Free Speech Conference on 20 June 2025.
In 2017, NGOs funded by the U.S. State Department began to push for social media “content moderation policies” to be required by governments in order to control the rise of populist parties in the EU, particularly those who are NATO- and EU-skeptic, and who may want normal trade relations with Russia. The U.S. State Department did a roadshow around the rise of NetzDG. Free speech on social media was blamed for the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, Marine Le Pen, the AfD, the VOX party in Spain, and Matteo Salvini in Italy. In all these countries, you had mainstream media pulling for the pro-EU, globalist candidate, whereas the nationalist party would have overwhelming support on social media. It really pitted these two media against each other. Government-directed content moderation was prohibited in the U.S. by the First Amendment. So the State Department and USAID-funded NGOs campaigned to install these on the other side of the Atlantic, while the U.S. set up a censorship apparatus using the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and hundreds of government-funded NGOs to contain the Trump problem, because of Russiagate.
If you look at the institutions around the Atlantic Council, GlobSec, Carnegie Endowment, and the Wilson Center, and trace their 2017 White Papers and forums, you’ll see support for NetzDG, because it imposed $50 million fines to shoehorn in this AI censorship arms race.
Trump did not control his own State Department, which was constantly playing shell games with the White House—often intermediated by USAID, an independent agency not on the National Security Council—so they don’t need to inform the President what they were doing. When Trump got into office, he defeated both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, the Democrats and the internationalist wing of his own Republican Party. There were no pro-Trump allies in the State Department in 2017. None. None of the career bureaucrats had any affinity with America First.
Trump did not focus on free speech until the end of his first term. I wrote a speech for the President in June 2020 about the need to take on the Censorship Industrial Complex. Trump looked up and didn’t read any of the facts or figures, but said it didn’t matter because there would be no way to stop his re-election. They tried to stop him in 2016 and it didn’t work. They could try as hard as they wanted, but it wouldn’t work in 2020, he thought. I was sitting in the back pulling my hair out, thinking, “Oh my God, you have no idea.” The Censorship Industrial Complex had three years of full-scale buildup and it was not until Trump got censored—eight out of ten Trump tweets would be censored in October 2020—that there was a kind of “Holy Crap!” moment within the Trump White House about the power of this network to swing elections.
He signed the bill authorizing it.
These groups are very experienced in diplo doublespeak, using language like “protecting democratic institutions.” If you are not versed, you have no idea what that means, that $10 million grant is going to fund censorship organizations, promote censorship laws in Europe, or fund judges in foreign countries to rule that ‘disinformation’ is a threat to democracy.
After the 2016 Trump election, the former head of NATO (2009-2014), Anders Fogh Rasmussen, formed the Transatlantic Committee on Election Integrity (TCEI) with Joe Biden to go after right-wing populist groups who were winning elections across Europe. The third person at TCEI was Victor Pinchuk, the single largest donor to the Clinton Global Foundation when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. Author’s note: Ukrainian oligarch Pinchuk is the son-in-law of former Ukraine President Leonid Kuchma and feuded with oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky over control of Ukrnafta and Naftogaz gas giants.
The conflict in Ukraine began in 2014, when the Obama administration pursued a maximum sanctions policy in Europe, going country by country to lean on every country’s Foreign Ministry to sanction Russian oil and gas, and to buy more expensive North American LNG. This was bad for Europe, but they felt obligated because of U.S. pressure. These right-wing populist groups did not want to comply with the Biden-Obama sanctions.
Ukraine’s national economy is dominated by the gas transits controlled by Naftogaz, who partner with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Halliburton, and Polish state-owned ORLEN. Chevron signed a $10 billion deal with Naftogaz 2013. Halliburton, whose chairman was Dick Cheney, signed a major deal with Naftogaz. Republican CIA official Cofer Black was on the board of Burisma, along with Hunter Biden. Shell also had a $10 billion deal with Naftogaz. George Soros bought a major equity stake in Halliburton.
So you have a multi-billion investment by Western energy firms in Ukrainian energy, in tandem with a push by the Obama and Biden State Department, the IMF, and World Bank to pressure Ukraine to privatize Naftogaz so that it could be controlled by Western energy stakeholders. George Soros has been leading this privatization push as intermediary for the IMF and via a U.S. State Department funded super-NGO in Ukraine called the Ukraine Crisis Media Center. UCMC threatened Zelensky in his first month in office with the so-called Red Lines Letter, preventing him from making peace with Russia or granting rights to the Russian minority in Eastern Ukraine. One of those Red Lines was opposing privatization of Naftogaz.
Exactly right. David Kramer, who was affiliated with UCMC, allegedly gave the Steele Dossier to BuzzFeed. They thought Trump’s neutrality with Russia would be a disaster for the billions of dollars in investment into Ukraine. The breakaway part of Ukraine after the 2014 coup was where the petroleum resources were, east of the Dnieper River and off the coast of Crimea. So you had tens of billions of dollars of investment by major companies who could only secure those investments by funding the Ukrainian military to take back the territory that declared itself independent of the U.S.-installed government. (Arseniy) Yatsenyuk was not elected by the people of Ukraine, he was installed by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Jeff Pyatt in 2014.
Pyatt led disinformation conferences for the Atlantic Council when the State Department was using the same diplomatic network they used for sanctions to push for censorship in Europe 2017. The Secretary of State at the time was Rex Tillerson, chairman of the board of ExxonMobil, who had major investments in Ukraine. Trump was focused on Ukraine and NATO policy, but he wasn’t focused on the State Department effort to censor Trump’s political allies.
This was a NATO-wide clandestine effort funded by the UK Foreign Office that involved senior British intelligence figures like Chris Donnelly and Richard Dearlove’s MI6 network. They had dozens of Cluster Cells in the UK, France, Germany, Lithuania. In Spain, they sabotaged the nomination of Pedro Baños as National Security Advisor by smearing him as a “Russian asset” in 2018. A British-funded intel op. was able to stop a foreign country’s political appointment.
Journalist Anne Applebaum was part of the UK inner cluster cell, as was former NATO press officer Ben Nimmo, who was leading Atlantic Council training sessions for journalists to hold up placards that read “I call bullshit” on Trump. The Atlantic Council was receiving millions of dollars from 11 different government agencies. So the Trump administration was paying for dozens of global media organizations to take Trump down. The Atlantic Council is NATO’s think-tank, and Trump’s lieutenants were simply trying to make sure the military establishment was aligned with Trump, who was fighting for his own political life, facing Ukraine impeachment, and an FBI special prosecutor. Trump did not know where his own funding was going. This is why DOGE has been such a dominant theme in Trump’s second term.
This is a major moment in my own personal journey chronicling all this. I saw the extreme censorship policies ISD were calling for in 2019 and said, “Who’s behind this?” Almost half their entire board came from the British military. The Atlantic Council operates the same way. They have seven former CIA directors on their board. Their biggest funders are the UK Foreign Office, State, Pentagon, military contractors from the U.S. and UK, and ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, and Chevron. The Atlantic Council was lobbying governments to censor anyone who might undermine the profits of those companies, who were simultaneously the censorship network’s donors. When Joe Biden left the White House in 2017, Burisma hired the Atlantic Council to lobby for it in Washington for $250,000 a year. So while it was technically Trump’s own executive branch that played the leading role to construct this apparatus and to push things like NetzDG, I don’t consider that to be a Trump initiative. Trump did not get wise to it until he was directly targeted in the 2020 election.
The U.S. State Department, USAID, and NATO were pushing that every step of the way. NATO StratCom COE (Communications Center of Excellence) is the social media supercenter for NATO, established in Riga after the Crimea disaster in 2014. On their own YouTube page, they were openly calling for the EU to establish a social media regulatory arm to contain the rise of rightwing populism.
Nina Jankowicz, who ran the Disinformation Governance Board and was in the Integrity Initiative, recently testified the EU should resist the United States because the U.S.A. under Trump has become an authoritarian government like Russia.
Sounds like something. This is an individual who was trained and funded for her whole career by U.S. taxpayer dollars to run these overt/covert meddling activities all across Europe in order to control political movements, to advance a rogue element of NATO and the Obama-Biden foreign policy establishment. She took that same set of skills to the United States, as if we were some foreign country where we need to stop the rise of a dictatorship. So the CIA has to intervene, working with media outlets and social media platforms. Jankowicz worked with the Wilson Center, which receives 33% of its budget from the State Department. Jankowicz had to register as a Foreign Agent when she started a USAID-funded, London-based counter-disinformation shop, the Center for Information Resilience, because of their censorship work in the United States. 23 U.S. government-funded NGOs are either signatory to or direct implementers of the EU Digital Services Act. The DSA is implemented by third-party NGOs and “independent experts”— nine of those are U.S. government-funded NGOs, including an institution called Globsec, which operates very aggressively in the V4 countries.
In May 2017, Globsec ran a “countering disinformation” event with Michael Chertoff and Christopher Walker from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Michael Chertoff was the head of DHS under Bush 2005- 2009 and was a major force behind the social media censorship operation. He helped pioneer the vision for CISA to do counter-disinformation work at the Atlantic Council. He wrangled three former heads of DHS, as well as dozens of different government sub-agencies, to organize DHS to move into the mis-/dis-/mal-information space.
Starting in 2018, they published a series of White Papers arguing that DHS plays the role of a domestic CIA. In May 2017, Chertoff and Walker told the heads of content moderation at Google and Facebook in Europe they need to fundamentally change the economics of online news in order to stop the rise of right-wing populist movements. They said empirical research has shown alternative news produces right-wing populist political movements and this is a threat to democracy. So Google, Facebook, if you know what’s best for you, you will take action to shut down alternative news on Facebook, YouTube, Google search, Instagram, Whatsapp. At the same time, Google launched its news ranking system “Project Owl,” so that there was no longer an information meritocracy on Google search. Google search used to rank according to politically agnostic measurements like how frequently something was hyperlinked by other sites. It did not have a blacklist. Project Owl automatically glued whitelisted, State Department-friendly media to the top of Google search results. If you look at Google search results before 2017, the top results were often independent or fringe news websites that had popular articles, more popular than CNN or the New York Times or Der Spiegel.
Google Jigsaw produced the world’s first retail AI censorship product called Perspective API, which was a way to rank every word online and create a toxicity score so that it could be automatically censored by AI. Jared Cohen went after orchestrating the Arab Spring, became the right-hand man of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and played a leading role in setting this up. Google is a shadow State Department and a major military contractor, highly dependent on government contracts. Google only has Google Maps because it bought the CIA’s spy satellite software Keyhole. Before Obama, Google wasn’t even in the top 100 companies. The Obama administration pulled every string in the book to give Google a competitive advantage. By the end of the Obama administration, Google was number four by market cap.
It was standard statecraft. The Obama administration funded USAID groups to try to regime-change Hungary’s government or conduct the Arab Spring. There was a reprieve during Trump 1, but USAID came right back to Hungary as soon as Biden was in office. This has been a tool since the Cold War era.
We took the same dirty toolkit that was used to ‘save democracy from communism’ to ‘save democracy from populism.’ At least you can argue that, under a communist government, there’s repression of the people. But these right-wing populist parties were democratically elected. Our democracy promotion toolkit set up to ‘save democracy from autocracy’ is now being used to ‘save autocracy from democracy,’ because these governments are installed and commanded by the State Department. They get rid of elections. There’s no elections in Ukraine; they canceled the first round of elections in Romania; they canceled elections in Pakistan. Bolsonaro is banned from running in Brazil and Marine LePen is banned from running in France because they would win.
Absolutely. They’ve already set up shop. As the money spigot is turned off, the U.S. censors are going to the EU, NATO, the UN, and private philanthropies like the Gates Foundation, Open Society, Knight Foundation, and Omidyar Network, so they can continue this censorship work. Their political lobbying manifests as legislative action from EU Commission bodies or from governments in Brazil, Australia, or Canada. NED President Damon Wilson just participated in a conference about private philanthropies needing to offset USAID cuts.
RFE/RL being funded by the EU is a massive attack on U.S. intel. RFE/RL is not a news network, it is an intelligence network established by the CIA. The proportion of folks at Radio Free Europe who have security clearances, who work directly with the Agency or indirectly through the State Department—you might as well have a full division at CIA headquarters in Langley funded directly by the EU.
It’s like building a giant political influence machine and then handing it off to a foreign country. I don’t believe the U.S. government should allow that. It should be dismantled first. Actions have to be taken so that any dollars collected from a foreign government are recouped by U.S. taxpayers for the damage these institutions have done. How many people were destroyed by these networks? It just came out in FOIA documents that the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) told NED they had gotten over a $100 million dollars in pro-Trump media advertising revenue cut. That is third-party tortious interference by a government-organized nongovernmental organization (GONGO).
Lawsuits need to recoup that money. These institutions either need to be aligned with U.S. interests or destroyed. They cannot defect as if they were some branch of the CIA that simply goes straight over to China or any other foreign country, to take a machine we built to do dirty work for a foreign body.
This interview appears in the Autumn 2025 issue of The European Conservative, Number 36:18-22.
