When Matt Taibbi Met Mike Benz - by Renee DiResta

Agents of Influence

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When Matt Taibbi Met Mike Benz<br>How independent media turned an obscure political operative into a "whistleblower"—and his claims into government action.

Renee DiResta<br>Aug 04, 2026

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The paperback of Invisible Rulers is out today, with a brand new chapter about how powerful elites in government now spin rumors into reality, justifying power grabs, dismantling agencies, and gutting budgets. You can find it on Amazon here, or independent/other bookstores here.<br>To mark the new edition, I’m releasing audio and a transcript from a Twitter Space in which journalist Matt Taibbi meets a then-unknown political operative named Mike Benz. It is the origin story of the “censorship industrial complex”: a lie, told by a manipulative man and laundered by a famous one, becomes the evidentiary basis for lawsuits, and investigations. Downstream of this event is the dismantling of several federal agencies, including one that delivered lifesaving aid to children.<br>“All of the missing pieces”

It was March 2, 2023. Matt Taibbi had just published a Twitter Files thread speculating about the State Department Global Engagement Center’s “state-sponsored blacklists” – lists of accounts that GEC suspected were foreign influence efforts, and which it sent over to Twitter. The company overwhelmingly took no action, noting that the suggestions were often unreliable.<br>Taibbi then linked the premise of flawed lists to other research organizations that also tracked foreign influence. These included the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and New Knowledge, where I’d worked for a year on a report examining a data set of actual, unambiguous Russian covert activity that the platforms themselves had turned over to the Senate Intelligence Committee.<br>“Can we at least stop paying to blacklist ourselves?” Taibbi dramatically asked. He mentioned that Jim Jordan had invited him to testify at the newly-formed Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. And he joined a Twitter Space to discuss the thread.<br>Mike Benz was in that audio chat room. He was a former Trump appointee who’d worked on the effort to prove that the 2020 election was rigged, and then went off to start a blog he called The Foundation for Freedom Online. He interrupted Taibbi’s recounting of his latest allegations with a dramatic opener:<br>“Matt, it’s worse than that.”<br>After some fumbling with his microphone, Benz introduced himself. Then he kicked the flattery into high gear:<br>“I’ve been hoping to talk to you for a long time,” Benz said, “because I believe I have all of the missing pieces of the puzzle that I’ve been watching you search for.”<br>He praised Taibbi’s “potentially history altering” reporting for a bit, then got to the point: “ I hope that maybe I can sort of upload my brain onto yours and see what you do with it.”<br>“Absolutely,” Taibbi said.<br>Benz cast himself as an insider who had watched a tyranny take shape. “I was the cyber DAS at State,” he said, “I ran the big tech portfolio at the State Department in 2020 during that time when all of this fusion between big tech and big government was happening.”<br>“Oh wow,” said Taibbi.<br>He said Google lobbyists called his desk seeking favors. He had watched the “censorship industry” grow with “total horror and fascination.”

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Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.Benz did not mention that he was appointed to this portfolio in November 2020. The Trump administration ended on January 20, 2021. His State Department tenure lasted roughly two months…over the holidays.<br>Taibbi bit immediately. He told Benz he’d sent him a DM, adding: “I’m very anxious to talk to you in a longer setting if that’s possible.” Benz, he said, “could probably be invaluable” to a huge project he was launching to map the same world.<br>Benz continued listing his bona fides: there was no close second with his knowledge, he said. He had delivered “eight or nine congressional briefings,” spoken with “four or five senators,” and briefed House and Senate committees. If Taibbi would talk to him privately, Benz said, he could describe “every single individual, institution, the chronology, the pretexts that were used, all of the dirty little tricks that were done each step of the way.”<br>“I can tell you literally everything,” he said.<br>“That’s great,” Taibbi replied.

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Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.Taibbi had privileged access to Twitter’s internal communications, and an enormous public audience, but the emails he’d highlighted repeatedly showed Twitter ignoring outside requests—not behaving deferentially. The Files writers liberally editorialized around cherrypicked excerpts (and even cut emails in half to change their context) but had yet to produce any evidence of actual mass censorship.<br>Benz jumped in to offer the missing architecture.<br>“Wow”

He launched...