On a recent episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Mike Benz revealed how USAID’s formal disinformation program is actively working to financially cripple media platforms deemed to be spreading “misinformation.”
Benz detailed how a 2021 USAID memo referenced advertisers 31 times, highlighting a coordinated effort to cut off revenue streams for independent media outlets and social media platforms that fail to align with government-approved narratives.
“USAID has a formal disinformation program focused on getting advertisers to cut off revenue to purveyors of misinformation,” Benz stated.
“They have this formally published. In fact, my organization, Foundation for Freedom Online, even published the formal disinformation primer in February 2021, one month after Biden took office, where, in a 97-page USAID disinformation program memo, 31 times they mentioned the word ‘advertisers’ as being necessary to kill the revenue to any social media site or independent web page that spreads misinformation.”
Benz explained that this strategy forces platforms to censor content or risk financial ruin.
“USAID is contorting the economics of the entire news industry to get platforms to censor lest they go economically bankrupt,” he said.
Benz pointed out that advertiser boycotts remain a major threat to Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), forcing the platform to rely on subscription-based revenue models.
“This is why they had to turn to subscriptions, like $8 a month, $12 a month, because of all the ad boycotts,” he said.
He contrasted Musk’s resilience to censorship pressure with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who in 2019 initially resisted increasing censorship but was quickly forced to comply after an advertiser boycott wiped out $60 billion in Facebook’s market cap within 48 hours.
“Zuckerberg was making public speeches saying that he thought censorship had gone too far on Facebook. That was 2019,” Benz recalled.
“But then he got hit with a very interesting boycott called #ChangeTheTerms. It was economically coercing Facebook to change its terms of service—to ban Trump supporters, Brexit supporters, and anyone in Europe supporting a right-wing populist party. Facebook lost $60 billion in market cap in 48 hours, and Zuckerberg folded like a lawn chair.”
Tucker Carlson pressed Benz for answers on who was behind the campaign:
“Who paid for #ChangeTheTerms?” Carlson asked.
Benz responded, “Oh, that’s… how many hours do you have?”
Carlson urged him to sum it up: “How about 60 seconds? Bottom line it for us.”
“I mean, nominally, it was the ADL and Color of Change under this kind of hate speech idea, but it was joined by dozens of USAID-funded and State Department-funded NGOs and civil society institutions,” Benz revealed.
“The buffering substructure for it were all these U.S. government intermediaries in country after country, pushing censorship through government-funded media and NGOs.”
Benz emphasized how U.S. foreign policy directly influences domestic policy, with censorship tools being exported globally under the guise of diplomacy.
Benz detailed how the U.S. State Department actively pressures foreign countries to pass censorship laws, targeting right-wing populist movements worldwide.
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“I’m going to say that again,” Benz stated.
“We have formal government programs at the State Department whose job is to lobby foreign countries and pressure them to pass censorship laws to stop the rise of domestic populist groups.”
He highlighted how American taxpayers unknowingly fund censorship abroad:
“You have truckers in America whose income tax is going to pay foreign governments to censor their citizens,” he added. “This is the schizophrenia of America right now.”
Carlson compared the U.S. government’s censorship strategy to Cold War-era Soviet tactics:
“We’re becoming the Soviet Union, which exported poison around the world for all those years,” Carlson said.
“I really felt like the United States was the bulwark against that. But whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. I’m trying to reassess. What is true now is we’re doing what they did. We’re sowing chaos and tyranny around the world. I am so heartbroken to see this.”
Benz agreed, explaining how NATO, the U.S. State Department, and the UK Foreign Office set up an entire censorship infrastructure after the 2016 election and Brexit to suppress political movements they opposed.
“They were very aware of what they were doing,” Benz said. “They knew they were doing exactly what they accused Russia and China of doing.”
Benz detailed how tens of millions of dollars from the U.S. State Department have funded:
- Censorship ‘mercenary firms’ in the private sector
- Civil society institutions and activist groups
- University censorship programs
- Government-funded media outlets pushing for more speech restrictions
Carlson pointed out how censorship efforts extend to mainstream media as well, asking, “I assume on cable television too. They’re everywhere, on all the channels.”
“Yes,” Benz confirmed.
“DHS actually onboards media organizations into its counter-disinformation work. Media is the fourth quadrant in this whole-society framework.”
Benz explained that there is no longer a distinction between U.S. foreign policy and domestic policy.
Carlson summed up the key takeaway:
“One of the things I’ve learned from you over the past couple of years—one big picture idea I didn’t fully appreciate until I listened to you carefully—was that our foreign policy drives our domestic policy.”
Benz responded:
“There’s no such thing as domestic policy. Every country’s domestic policy is another country’s foreign policy,” he said. “Everything that happens in this country is an outgrowth, a function of our management of the world.”
He pointed to the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, the primary driver of U.S. government-funded censorship efforts worldwide.
The center, founded by Rick Stengel, has actively worked to export censorship programs while calling for restrictions on the First Amendment at home.
Carlson did not mince words in his assessment of Stengel: “This is a very evil man, Rick Stengel,” he said.
Benz elaborated on how quickly U.S. government institutions abandoned free speech principles after Trump’s election.
“All it took was one election for 200 years of a First Amendment principle to be entirely discarded,” Benz said. “Because it was leading to the wrong kinds of people being elected.”
Benz’s revelations expose how the U.S. government, through USAID and the State Department, has been actively involved in global censorship efforts under the guise of combating “misinformation.”
From coercing advertisers to defund independent media to pressuring foreign governments to implement censorship laws, the infrastructure built to control speech abroad is now being used at home.
As Carlson and Benz made clear, this is not just about controlling narratives overseas—it’s about controlling free speech in America itself.
