Mike Benz is probably one of very few people who understand how the U.S. government actually works.
I have been very fortunate to be around bright people all of my life. My parents were German Jewish refugees, and my father was a professor of organic chemistry. The high school I attended was one of the best public schools in the country; my class sent nine students to Harvard, with a couple more accepted but heading elsewhere. My first experience with Harvard occurred the night before my arrival. I was with my parents in a hotel a few miles from campus, and as one did in those days, we watched the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. One of his guests was Grant Colfax, who was also going to be starting at Harvard the next day. Why was he on the show? Because he had been homeschooled his entire life. As I lay awake in bed, I thought that every single future classmate of mine would go on to be a Rhodes Scholar, Nobel laureate, genius professor or the like—all of them except me.
During my Ph.D. work at Wisconsin, I was also privileged to be surrounded by extremely bright professors and students. One professor stood out for his brilliance. W. W. “Mo” Cleland was a professor of biochemistry and a world-class expert on enzyme kinetics. How well respected was he in his field? Hundreds of articles had a thank you to him at the end for “enlightening discussions” as oftentimes he was the only one who could figure out the nuanced details of a complex enzymatic reaction. When I did a rotation through his lab, I saw some mail sitting around. I asked a post-doc about a particular envelope and he told me that it was from the Nobel Committee seeking his nomination of a laureate in chemistry. When he lectured and explained kinetic coefficients backwards and forwards for a reaction, my hand wrote, but my eyes glazed over. I felt his words flying over my head.
I was reminded of Professor Cleland while listening to a couple of podcasts with Mike Benz. The first was a long interview with Tucker Carlson. I began to follow Benz on X and recently heard part of his podcast with Joe Rogan. I do not know how many people in the United States have the grasp that he has on what actually goes on in our government at home and abroad. He rattles off different State Department offices and NGOs and how they interact, get funded, and work hand-in-hand towards some predetermined goal. I get lost in a few seconds when he begins to throw out numerous three-letter names for all of these bodies and explains where they sit in the bureaucratic hierarchy and what their goals are. I do my best to follow the thread of some nefarious program that starts at a regional desk at the State Department and then moves through various "cutouts" and governmental programs like USAID and finally upends Brazil or Ukraine not for the benefit of those countries or even for U.S. industry, but rather to keep those countries in line with the goals of the State Department. His talks can be exhausting as one must pay attention every moment or lose the big picture.
And what is that big picture? We have always assumed that our governmental agencies like State and the CIA work to keep America safe. In the 1940s and 1950s, that would have meant weakening communism and preventing its spread into Western countries and the U.S. itself. What Benz repeatedly shows is that the same bodies that ostensibly worked to undermine America’s enemies now see America’s enemies not so much as North Korea and Iran but more closely Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the tens of millions who like them. In one of his presentations, Benz showed how agents of the U.S. government acted with the lefty government of Brazil to forward the ban on X/Twitter in Brazil. It would appear that U.S. bureaucracies and the NGOs that they generously support as well as their media partners are focused in fighting the populist movements in the U.S. and abroad. In the U.S., it is almost axiomatic that if someone runs afoul of the “blob,” problems then ensue. Mayor Eric Adams of New York complained about the effects of an open border on his city and was shortly thereafter the subject of an intense Department of Justice investigation that included indictments. If President Zelensky decides that peace is the best course for his battered country, he might find a State Department mini-coup to remove him and find someone who is willing to continue the fight against Russia. If one crosses the blob, the latter has nearly limitless resources internally and externally to fight against the offender.
That Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan have recently interviewed Benz obviously means that he is known to those close to Donald Trump. I don’t know if he could best serve the country from the inside as some formal advisor or from the outside, where he has no governmental limits to his activities or commentaries. The one thing that is clear is that the incoming Trump administration needs Mike Benz and anyone else who can follow the threads of State, the Pentagon and all of their associated NGOs, university grants, and media abettors. This monster needs to be taken apart and kept under a watchful, transparent oversight apparatus. The same organizations and mechanisms put in place to keep the U.S. safe by any means have been turned against populist elements in the U.S. and beyond by elites who see people choosing the candidates of their choice as being the real threat to what they cynically call "democracy."
While I might get lost after five minutes of a Mike Benz lecture, I know that the fellow is on to something important. He needs to be involved in the taming of the bureaucratic state so that it once again serves the interests of the American people rather than go rogue and attempt to stifle political activity that a powerful minority considers dangerous to their continued control. The disingenuous words like “misinformation” and “disinformation” only came into vogue when those in control did not like people discussing true topics like the source of the Covid virus or the harm experienced by many of those who took the experimental mRNA vaccines. There is no “dis” or “mis” when people tell the truth; it is only uncomfortable for those who wish to control the narrative. Their power over our world needs to be curtailed permanently.
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