{"id":153236,"date":"2023-10-25T17:21:24","date_gmt":"2023-10-26T01:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=153236"},"modified":"2025-12-07T05:05:31","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T13:05:31","slug":"the-new-yorker-jim-jordans-conspiratorial-quest-for-power-how-the-ohio-republican-built-an-insurgent-bid-for-speaker-on-the-lies-of-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=153236","title":{"rendered":"The New Yorker: Jim Jordan\u2019s Conspiratorial Quest for Power – How the Ohio Republican built an insurgent bid for Speaker on the lies of Donald Trump."},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Blitzer writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* …online conspiracists began claiming that Starbird and other researchers at the Election Integrity Partnership had colluded with the Department of Homeland Security to censor twenty-two million tweets during the 2020 election. This was, Starbird told me, \u201ca literal misreading\u201d of the group\u2019s findings. But the conspiracy theory had all the key elements to spread widely, starting with the fact that it was politically useful. \u201cPeople wanted to believe it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Allegations began to appear on fringe news outlets, such as the Gateway Pundit. On August 27, 2022, Mike Benz, an ex-Trump appointee who runs an organization called the Foundation for Freedom Online, wrote that his expos\u00e9 of D.H.S. would provide \u201cthe basis for a full-scale bipartisan Congressional committee armed with subpoena power.\u201d The story soon reached Breitbart and Steve Bannon\u2019s podcast. On Twitter, Trump supporters told Starbird to lawyer up.<\/p>\n

* Of all the partisans spreading attacks against the researchers, the most significant was initially one of the most obscure. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s possible to have spent more hours a day on this,\u201d Mike Benz, of the Foundation for Freedom Online, has said. \u201cMy wife calls it the man in the box because my whole life has just been listening to this whole network, day and night, and chronicling and archiving and explaining.\u201d<\/p>\n

Benz, a lawyer by training, describes himself on his organization\u2019s Web site as \u201ca former State Department diplomat responsible for formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters.\u201d But a recent investigation by NBC News found that several years ago he maintained an online persona under which he posted explosively antisemitic and racist content. In one post, from 2017, he wrote, \u201cIf I, a Jew, a member of the Tribe, Hebrew Schooled, can read Mein Kampf and think \u2018holy shit, Hitler actually had some decent points.\u2019 Then NO ONE is safe from hating you once they find out who is behind the White genocide happening all over the world.\u201d His inspiration, whom he credited with \u201cputting the puzzle together,\u201d was the alt-right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos. A year later, Benz stopped posting under his white-nationalist pseudonym and entered the federal government, taking a speechwriting job in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He joined the State Department in November, 2020, but left a couple of months later, at the start of the Biden Administration.<\/p>\n

Since then, as the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, where he appears to be the sole employee, he has focused much of his attention on Ren\u00e9e DiResta, the research director of Stanford\u2019s Internet Observatory and one of Starbird\u2019s co-authors on the Election Integrity Partnership\u2019s final report. DiResta has a number of associations that are easy to misrepresent. As an undergraduate, she interned at the C.I.A. Before joining Stanford, she served as the research director of a controversial cybersecurity firm called New Knowledge. In 2017, during Roy Moore\u2019s Alabama Senate race, New Knowledge experimented with a small-scale disinformation campaign of its own. According to the Times, the effort included creating a Facebook account meant to draw in conservative voters. (DiResta was not working for the company at the time.) The next year, she testified before the Senate on Russian interference in the 2016 election; a team she led then wrote up a report for the Senate Intelligence Committee. On the Web site of the Foundation for Freedom Online, Benz outlined what he called DiResta\u2019s \u201ccensorship industry career arc\u201d and wrote that \u201cthe prominent role Renee DiResta plays in EIP\u2014a government-partnered Internet censorship consortium\u2014is particularly worrisome and disturbing.\u201d<\/p>\n

* On March 2nd of this year, in a Twitter Spaces conversation attended by some thirty-nine thousand users, Benz made contact with Taibbi. \u201cI\u2019ve been hoping to talk to you for a long time because I believe I have all of the missing pieces of the puzzle,\u201d he told Taibbi, according to a recording of the conversation. \u201cYou\u2019re someone who can actually communicate the story to a large platform. I can tell you literally everything.\u201d The E.I.P., Benz said, was \u201cthe deputized disinformation flagger for D.H.S.\u201d He went on, \u201cBasically, they gave this private group\u2014E.I.P.\u2014D.H.S.-F.B.I. powers to talk directly to the key content-moderation liaisons.\u201d Taibbi responded, \u201cI\u2019m very anxious to talk to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

A week later, at Jordan\u2019s invitation, Taibbi and another journalist involved in the Twitter Files, Michael Shellenberger, gave public testimony before the weaponization subcommittee. While they addressed the members, Benz, dressed in a dark suit, sat in the row behind them. Both Taibbi and Shellenberger cited the E.I.P. and the twenty-two million censored tweets, though that figure never appeared in the materials they\u2019d published in the Twitter Files. Afterward, they acknowledged that Benz had helped them with their testimony. Evidently, it was his influence that led Shellenberger to call the E.I.P. \u201cthe seed of the censorship-industrial complex.\u201d<\/p>\n

* They weren\u2019t alone in relying on Benz. By then, he claimed to have given eight congressional briefings, spoken regularly with congressmen and senators, and addressed members of the House Oversight, Homeland Security, and Judiciary Committees. On March 10th, Jordan sent letters to Starbird, DiResta, and Alex Stamos, the head of Stanford\u2019s Internet Observatory, demanding access to e-mails and other communications with both the government and the tech platforms dating back to January, 2015.<\/p>\n

Within days, Taibbi posted another thread in the Twitter Files about the \u201cGreat Covid-19 Lie Machine: Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of \u2018True Stories.\u2019 \u201d After the 2020 election, many of the researchers involved in the Election Integrity Partnership had regrouped and launched the Virality Project, making its mission the tracking of online misinformation surrounding covid vaccines. This time, the mechanics of the operation were simpler. D.H.S. was not involved. Researchers posted their findings online each week and sent them to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Surgeon General. Taibbi\u2019s thread, which received more than forty million views, rearranged information that Stanford had already been making available. \u201cEven though all of our work is public, they reframed it as a secret cabal,\u201d DiResta told me. \u201cI study rumors and propaganda, but that doesn\u2019t mean we can do anything to stop them when we become the subject. It\u2019s a problem for the field. What can you do when it happens?\u201d<\/p>\n

* When Starbird and I spoke in July, she was about to fly across the country again, this time at the request of the House Homeland Security Committee. Bishop chairs its oversight subcommittee, and he had some more questions. According to multiple Republican and Democratic staffers, Bishop and Jordan were sometimes at odds. Bishop felt that Jordan could be doing more to push the investigation. When I asked one of the staffers what that meant, I was told, \u201cJordan only pursues most of Mike Benz\u2019s theories. Bishop wants to run down all of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

* He described the end goal of Jordan, Benz, and others as the turning of social media into \u201cnato for maga: keep the liberals out, the voters down, keep us in power.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Blitzer writes: * …online conspiracists began claiming that Starbird and other researchers at the Election Integrity Partnership had colluded with the Department of Homeland Security to censor twenty-two million tweets during the 2020 election. This was, Starbird told me, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42720,21791,43022],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alt-right","category-america","category-mike-benz"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t