Grifters And Bad Actors Have WON, Political Discourse Is DEAD ft. Mike Benz
Mike Benz and Tim Pool argue that social media platforms like X have superseded legacy media, concentrating influence among a tiny elite of world leaders while incentivizing sensationalist content over novel ideas. They dismiss claims of foreign state-sponsored influence regarding the Iran-Israel conflict and Epstein files as overstated excuses for unpopular opinions, noting that organic networks from India and Indonesia drive real discourse. The discussion critiques journalists like Piers Morgan for becoming "trollish" in petty feuds, suggesting this shift has effectively killed meaningful political discourse by prioritizing engagement over truth. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, if Walter Cronkite had a Twitter account, all the mystique of it would go away because you know what he thinks about when he's going to the bat.
You know his opinion on, you know, things he's, he'd be too tempted to be way out of his depth on everything.
But it's like, we, these are the most trollish people of all.
And I had to bring you in specifically for this interesting, I wouldn't have seen it unless you put it on my timeline from Axios, where they're saying it's the terminally online news junkies who are detached from the actual reality.
This is the weirdest retconning I think I've seen in a long time coming from Axios of all people.
You said you're a news agency posting this online telling us we're detached from reality for reading you.
So I had to bring you in to talk about this specifically and this, I guess, like ethos that these journals have these days that, you know, it's the right-wing chuds that are really the ones stirring the pot and everything.
I was wondering what your thoughts were on all of this.
This really started in the 2016 era when Trump won initially on the back of social media.
And it was really kind of the first election in which social media was dispositive over legacy media in terms of influence.
And that caused, I think, not just financial shocks in the news industry, but also psychological ones.
And there has been this kind of idea that, you know, social media is not as it's still not as important.
It's still not where reality is really made.
I happen to think, frankly, it's kind of the opposite.
I think actually social media is even more real and scales with much more impact.
Frankly, I think unless something trends on social media, regular media almost doesn't matter.
But what they cite are statistics like only 21% of the U.S. population uses X and only 10% uses it every day.
Well, okay, well, what percent of the population reads the New York Times every day?
And frankly, when you say reads the New York Times, just because you order it and shows up at your doorstep doesn't mean that you've really been hit by it.
I think when you the feed on something like X and Instagram, TikTok, whatever it is, it just hits you right away, whatever's trending.
Yeah, well, I mean, to your point, I mean, the majority of people ordering the newspaper nowadays are doing the crossword chunking it.
So, I mean, like, I actually read somewhere that is true.
Like, the majority of the New York Times readership is subscribed for the crossword, which is really funny, very salient.
But yeah, I mean, to your point, you know, the majority of Americans, I think, are tapped out from the actual zeitgeist, but the zeitgeist is being developed on X for the most part nowadays.
And the proof for that is literally everything that comes out of the Trump badminton and like the Senate Democrats.
It's literally just like the timeline being regurgitated by these figures.
So, you know, again, people point that out all the time and they say, well, the majority of Americans are already been on X, but the reality is that's where the discourse is being formed.
And for the 80% or so of Americans that aren't on X, the talking points they're using that they're throwing at each other were developed on X, whether they like it or not.
There's very rarely are we seeing stories, narratives, discourse, again, that's developed independently outside of the online space, for lack of a better word.
There's a famous neoconservative who I think back in the 1980s was in a debate and there was an argument that your ideas are unpopular.
Your magazine only has 2,000, a circulation of 2,000 people.
And gosh, I forget who it was who said it, but I remember the person quit back and said, but it's the right 2,000 people.
And that really, I think, gets to the heart of why X is so much more influential than Axios, frankly, when it comes and why it is that I think Axios has a little bit of, I guess, penis envy over the reach of social media.
Which is that it may only be a fraction of the population, but it's the fraction of the population with influence.
It's every world leader.
It's every politician.
It's most captains of industry at this point.
This is where press announcements are made.
If a company doesn't make a social media statement about, I don't know, a new line of burgers, it's almost like they didn't really do it.
I mean, and this is one of the, I don't know if you agree with this assessment, but a lot of people over the last, like literally, this has happened over the last few months.
A lot of guys I know who have either have the ear of a lot of top Republicans or at least are influencing a lot of top Republicans are growing increasingly frustrated with the direction the discourse has gone specifically on X regarding political commentary.
A lot of these guys are tapping out.
You know, I don't want to name names here, but a lot of guys are just like, I'm kind of done.
Like it's gotten so bad.
The incentive structure for political commentary has been completely inverted where it used to be like if you presented something novel, then people would kind of listen and they'd follow and pay attention.
But now it's like, it's always been this way to a degree, but it's really on steroids now is it's like whoever can Mr. Beastify their content the most is going to dominate and they're going to occupy the most space.
And so a lot of people are just kind of throwing their hands up and they're frustrated because, I mean, like you said, it's about the right 2,000 followers, but only so many people can, you know, pay the bills with that limited reach.
Like a lot of these guys are getting frustrated that their potential audience is being captured by, quite frankly, a lot of slop.
Well, I don't particularly feel the pressure to Mr. Beastify the content.
I can see that if you have a frustration with the direction that politics are trending in general, being in the line of business of trying to influence politics when things are not going your way is a lot less fun.
And, you know, I, to some extent, am feeling some of that with some of the events that are happening right now in the world, you know, at least for the past 12 days, let's say.
And so I've posted a lot less.
My motivation has been pretty not insignificantly hit just because you don't necessarily want to post into a cycle where there might be an amazing story about NGO corruption or some censorship event in Spain.
And you put that against what's happening here and you go.
Is this really what I consider to be the most important thing in the world right now?
And I think that a lot of people are feeling things like that, that there were so many other issues, for example, before the past two weeks, whether that's immigration, whether that's the cost of housing, whether that's anything happening in the homeland, whether that's a number of other foreign policy issues.
And it all gets swallowed in the face of war.
And then there are other things, I think, that have been happening around just certain developments within MAGA that leave a lot of the MAGA faithful a little bit disenchanted to.
I mean, if you look at this rally right now against Thomas Massey, who I think a lot of people in the MAGA base consider to be a hero, he's the one who got us the Epstein files.
And in the middle of the Iran war, the president is stopping everything to fly to Kentucky to personally campaign against him.
And it's like, make it make sense in a way that we can live with.
Yeah, it's really frustrating to your point for the MAGA faithful because we're the only ones here that don't really have like there's not really one strong way that we're leaning.
I mean, it's because you have your neocons who are like over the moon about all this.
And then, of course, you have what's been dubbed the retard right now, plus the left who are just going to counter signal every single thing Trump does.
And it kind of leaves the MAGA faithful in a weird spot because, again, I think the number, and I've talked about this, you know, at length on the show is the number one issue, I think, with this war is that it's a gift for like some of these like the worst people and politics.
And there's just very little in it for the MAGA faithful.
And so that's why I think a lot of us kind of feel a bit rudderless right now.
I wanted to ask you, because I mean, you would be, you know, one of the guys that would be in the know on this.
I mean, in regards to wartime propaganda, these sorts of things, these sorts of elements, I mean, there's so many accusations right now of, oh, well, this person's acting on behalf of a foreign country or this person.
And like it's everyone on either side of the world right now.
How much of that is legitimate?
How much of that is real?
Like, how does like international influence operations, how do they work in a moment like this?
Because this kind of feels like a big flashpoint.
And again, these accusations are flying left and right.
In general, I think state-sponsored influence operations tend to be vastly overstated.
You do have mostly organic affinity networks that certainly pile up very, very strong.
And so, and you see that, for example, even within MAGA, you don't really have the Trump campaign going out and paying influencers to promote Trump.
That was never really a thing.
You have a few of these kind of influenceable type things and a couple of these agencies, but that's a tiny little pinky finger.
But there is a kind of almost organic commercial base in terms of people build their brand as influencers or as journalists covering stories on certain beats.
And it's the same thing when it comes to state-level affinities, whether that's the pro-Israel side or the pro-Palestinian side.
And, you know, and now we're seeing this new emergence.
I just saw this, and I think the Wall Street Journal earlier, the Iranian disinformation, they're kicking up.
This is the whole thing with Russian disinformation.
It was all this kind of state-sponsored internet research agency type stuff.
And now I'm seeing the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which is this big CIA cut out that was funded by the State Department and USAID, and I think even the Justice Department.
And they just came out with this new study about Irani.
Oh, here's what it was.
It said that the attempt to dub Operation Epic Fury Operation Epstein Fury was an Iranian disinformation campaign that Americans are unwittingly falling for.
So basically, almost threatening that if you dare say that this has anything to do with Epstein, and I'm not even making that accusation, but the fact is, like, for example, I mean, Trump flying to Kentucky in the middle of this.
I agree that it seems like people completely overstate foreign influence, whether, again, it's people on the right, left, et cetera.
Because, and kind of to the point with the Axios article where they're kind of outsourcing all the blame to like these nefarious algorithms, that sort of thing, is because I think for the majority of people, and this goes into the conspiracy world and these sorts of things, is they just need to feel like there's an explanation, something is in control, like there's something controlling this, that this isn't just kind of a random, you know, ever-changing situation.
But I think the reality is with discourse, certainly, a lot of these people I know that are fervently like pro-Israel, for example, and they're getting all these accusations being paid.
I'm like, I've talked to these people off camera.
That's all they talk about.
That's like their thing.
Trust me.
They don't need any payment to talk about these things.
And so, but, you know, I think it's just, it's easier for people to explain this.
They say, well, this person's being paid by Iran, you know, to spread this propaganda or these sorts of things because it kind of gives people a sense of, okay, well, no one could actually held that position.
It's just someone's in control.
That's what's going on.
Things that people are being paid.
When I'm like, the reality is, you know, again, with the internet, information has been democratized.
People are going to have a wide range of disagreements on a variety of topics.
And I mean, I'm sure it does exist to some degree, to your point.
I mean, I just think it's a bit overstated, to say the least.
And also the fact it just, it does just straight up delegitimize the other school of that.
So it's a way to try to use kind of a dirty trick to argue that the entirety of the Argumentative framework against what you want is illegitimate because it's synthetically produced because of state propaganda or something.
And what's so funny is these will be the same people who tell you that USAID needs to spend $10 billion a year on propaganda because journalism saves lives.
And people are just like blaming the wrong things for situations where, okay, maybe there is a thumb put on the scale and like a situation on a certain side of discourse.
They refuse to say the issue, which I primarily see on X, which is the entire third world now has smartphones and they're like weighing in on American topics.
And so they're, again, like, you have a billion and a half Indians and they're generally in agreement on everything regarding American politics.
And so, yeah, they're going to like weigh in on one side or like the entire like a country, like Indonesia, they're all on X now.
Like, but no one ever talks about that.
They're like, because I guess that would be like mean or xenophobic.
So they'd rather just, again, blame like, oh, they're botting.
They are like, it'll like appear instantly after you, because I'll like do a tweet and there will be like a stock, you know, account that'll be like, this post makes the point that sunshine and rainbows are really, you know, it's not really raining today.
It's this, and, and it's like, okay, you managed to do this like 279 character tweet within a microsecond.
You're the first comment, your avatar is like some Japanese, you know, like, I don't know, it's, it's, these things are obvious.
This attempt to delegitimize people by saying that they're, they're bots.
And, and the fact that they even conflate that with trolls, they'll say bots and trolls.
Have you ever seen a professionally journalist when, I mean, this is a big mistake when all the big journalists got on Twitter and they, you know, because we got to see who they are.
You know, if Walter Cronkite had a Twitter account, all the mystique of it would go away because you know what he thinks about when he's going to the battle.
You'd know his opinion on things he's, he'd be too tempted to be way out of his depth on everything.
But it's like, these are the most trollish people of all.
It kind of humanizes like peers and other people to me, even when I see their kind of, you know, lowbrow, petty, you know, just random thoughts of the day.
But I mean that more in the sense that we know you're not holier than us.
I mean, all this tongue wagging about, oh, you know, the internet dog piles and these troll accounts.
And it's like, then you see all these, all these journal.
I mean, this just happened to me.
John Oliver just attacked me in this segment two nights ago on his whatever HBO show.
And I only found out about it because another news outlet, which is supposed to be the, it's called the OCCRP, the Corruption Reporting Project.
The world's largest consortium of investigative journalists, every year they win, you know, all the awards.
They are the ones who publish the Panama papers and things like that.
50% of their paycheck came from the U.S. State Department and USAID.
Their seed money came from a CIA cutout.
Their initial funding came from the State Department and INS, the intelligence wing of ODNI.
And it's like, I found out about this hit piece about me from John Oliver because this outlet funded by my tax dollars wrote this super petty post saying, John Oliver has identified the source of the problem, far-right activist Mike Benz, who campaigned against us.
It's like, you know, it's like what you said, like the aura loss, negative 10,000.
It's like, okay, that's the sort of thing that I would expect my kid sister back in like high school to write about like a girlfriend that, you know, like, you know, didn't call her back on a Wednesday or something.
It's like, this is like I, it's fair, fair game, I suppose.
I don't want to be paying for tweets against myself.
That feels a little weird.
I'd like the government to give me money so that I can retaliate against them.
But leaving that aside, it's like, you don't get to talk about trolls now.
You're doing like these personal petty, this is not breaking news.