(Zero Hedge)—Mike Benz, the former State Department official who would later shed light on the Government-Big Tech censorship complex, has now accused the U.S. intelligence community of attempting to wage what he describes is an “undeclared second Cold War” against populism at home and abroad.
“They said communism was a threat to democracy because it usurps the will of the people, it imposes government controls over everything from the media to the means of production, to wealth and economic redistribution,” Benz recently told podcast host Benny Johnson.
The Undeclared Second Cold War: The intelligence community took the same global apparatus set up to stop left-wing communism and repurposed it to wage a global war on right-wing populism. That is a part of US history now that has to be declassified. pic.twitter.com/vgc63Sb5OV
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) April 18, 2025
“But they said populism was a threat to democracy because it, quote, weakens democratic institutions. Democratic institutions mean basically anyone that the foreign policy establishment supports, whether that’s in media, they call the news media democratic institution, they don’t call the Benny Johnson show an institution, they’ll call the New York Times an institution, they’ll call universities an institution, they’ll call Harvard an institution, they won’t call something like Liberty University an institution.”
Benz is calling for the wholesale declassification of the intelligence communities efforts to suppress populism, along with congressional investigations and hearings.
“The point is, is any act of the people that undermines elements of their control is categorized as a threat to democracy and subjected to the same apparatus that we constructed during the war on communism. And I believe this story can really only be fully told through declassifications and hearings that are similar to the church committee hearing,” Benz said. “And that framework for understanding nationalism and populism, as opposed to socialism and communism in the 1960s and 70s, has to run through every element of control by the IC that was weaponized at home.”
Since departing the State Department, Benz has led efforts to expose government, especially intelligence community, involvement in censoring free speech on social media. A key focus was the Global Engagement Center (GEC), originally established in 2007 as the Counterterrorism Communication Center to combat propaganda from groups like Al-Qaeda. Rebranded as the GEC in 2016 under President Obama, it shifted to countering foreign disinformation. Despite its foreign focus, the GEC faced accusations in legal cases for participating in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which flagged election-related disinformation on social media, the Epoch Times reports.
Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the closure of the Global Engagement Center (GEC), criticizing its role in suppressing Americans’ free speech.
“Over the past half-decade, bodies like GEC, crafted by our own governing ruling class, nearly destroyed America’s long free speech history,” Rubio wrote in an op-ed for The Federalist. “The enemies of speech had new lingo to justify their authoritarian impulse. It was ‘disinformation,’ allegedly pushed by nefarious foreign governments, that was the No. 1 threat to ‘our democracy.’ To protect ‘our democracy,’ this ‘disinformation’ had to be identified and stamped out.”
Rubio highlighted a 2020 GEC report that labeled public speculation about the origins of the COVID-19 virus—such as claims it was an “engineered bioweapon” or linked to “research conducted at the Wuhan institute”—as part of a “Russian disinformation apparatus.” He noted that the GEC not only flagged specific claims as foreign propaganda but also targeted individual users.
On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning government censorship to safeguard free speech.
“No longer will our government label the speech of our own citizens as misinformation or disinformation, which are the favorite words of censors and those who wish to stop the free exchange of ideas and, frankly, progress,” Trump told the World Economic Forum. “We have saved free speech in America, and we’ve saved it strongly with another historic executive order.”
