Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who is currently helping to carry out Donald Trump’s deportation efforts, often using dubious accusations of antisemitism — recently sat for an interview with Michael Benz, a former State Department official-turned-MAGA influencer who has a history of promoting antisemitic hate speech.
Rubio’s antisemitism accusations have targeted a number of legal U.S. residents, including Columbia University students Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil, the latter of whom Rubio has claimed would create a “hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States” if allowed to remain in the country. Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, a visa holder, has also garnered headlines recently as a target of the State Department, despite an internal memo that reportedly found no evidence to link her to antisemitism or support for terrorism.
When Rubio sat with Benz, it was primarily to boast about his dismantling of the United States’ ability to counter the spread of disinformation online. The State Department posted an apparent transcript of the interview here. Rubio opened with the line, “We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department,” even as he is trying to remove international students for their speech.
Here’s how NBC News described Benz’s online history in 2023:
But before his stints in government and as a pundit, Benz appears to have been a pseudonymous alt-right content creator who courted and interacted with white nationalists and posted videos espousing racist conspiracy theories, according to recordings, livestreams and blog posts reviewed by NBC News. The pseudonym, Frame Game, posted videos and participated in podcasts and livestreams during the rise of the alt-right following Donald Trump’s election. Frame Game avoided showing his face in his videos or appearances, during which he pushed a variety of far-right narratives including the ‘Great Replacement Theory’ that posits the white race is being eradicated in America for politics and profits. In others, Frame Game said he was a white identitarian, railed against the idea of diversity and made montages urging white viewers to unite under the banner of race. In interviews with white nationalists, Frame Game blamed Jews for ‘controlling the media’ and for the decline of the white race. ‘If you were to remove the Jewish influence on the West,’ he said in one video, ‘white people would not face the threat of white genocide that they currently do.’
The Frame Game account posted a blog in 2017 that described its author as “a Jew who is deeply sympathetic to the AltRight’s accurate depiction of the double-edged nature of Jewish influence on Europe and America.” Another post claimed “Hitler actually had some decent points.” NBC News reported that posts from Benz’s account stopped in 2018.Benz, who is Jewish, admitted his connection to the account after the publication of NBC News’ report, claiming the account was part of an effort to discourage antisemitism. “The account in question was a project by Jews to get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews,” he said. “Let me be clear: I am extremely proud of this.”
Promoting antisemitism to stop antisemitism? An interesting strategy, to say the least. The topic of Benz’s history of giving props to Hitler and promoting white nationalism, unsurprisingly, didn’t come up during his conversation with Rubio, despite the latter’s stated concern about people who create a “hostile environment for Jewish students.”
The interview embodies the administration’s shameless hypocrisy and its disingenuous use of antisemitism claims to crack down on its enemies, even as some of its most popular and powerful allies boost antisemitism themselves.