The old "Twitter files" gang has gotten back together to attack USAID

Here's a headline from Newsmax that you might have missed if you haven't been paying attention to right wing news: "USAID Paid for Trump Impeachment Effort." The author of that piece is quoting Michael Shellenberger, of "Twitter files" fame. 

The claim is that USAID provides funding to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which, in 2019, published a report on Rudy Giuliani's work with Lev Parnas and Igor Furman to fabricate dirt on Joe Biden. The whistleblower's complaint that spurred Trump's first impeachment cited that report four times. Nevermind that pretty much everything reported by OCCRP and the whistleblower turned out to be true, somehow USAID funding is to blame, not a president who engaged in lies and extortion. 

Apparently our shadow president thinks these accusations raise good questions.

As Brandy Zadrozny and Lora Kolodny explain, the lies being perpetrated about USAID reveal a "pattern [that] is similar to one that played out with the so-called Twitter Files in 2022, when selectively framed narratives and out-of-context internal documents were weaponized to fuel allegations of a grand government censorship conspiracy." But it's not only the methods that are the same. The players are also the ones who were involved in the whole Twitter Files affair: Elon Musk, Mike Benz, Michael Shellenberger, and (to a smaller extent) Matt Taibbi.

While you may not have heard of Mike Benz (the guy Musk responded to in the post above), he is the one behind both the attacks on Twitter and USAID. 

Benz, 39, has positioned himself as a leading voice for many conservatives by tapping into a broader right-wing wave of disaffection with perceived social media and government censorship...

Benz also amplified the “Twitter Files,” documents released by Musk that revealed internal debates about content moderation and communications with outside organizations, governments, journalists and researchers. For months, in videos and threads posted to Twitter, Benz has framed those internal debates as grand conspiracies and maligned the academic researchers and institutions involved as government spies and plants.

When it comes to USAID, Benz has been spreading lies about the organization since 2022.

Over the next two years, he posted waves of tweets and dozens of hours of video presentations marked with highlighted texts and red notes, scribbles, circles and arrows, flicking at a sprawling narrative of USAID as a covert operations division of the CIA in which staff members sought to enrich themselves, spread leftist ideology at home and abroad and harm Trump. The theory alleged that USAID was behind the mass censorship of Americans, as well as global efforts to manipulate social media, rig elections and quash dissent.

Oh...and Benz is also (surprise, surprise) a white supremacist.

Benz appears to have been a pseudonymous alt-right content creator who courted and interacted with white nationalists and posted videos espousing racist conspiracy theories, according to recordings, livestreams and blog posts reviewed by NBC News.

Perhaps now you see why our shadow president is so fond of Benz that he's interacted with him on X over 40 times in the last week. Either Musk buys into all of the conspiracy theories about USAID, or he finds them useful for his own nefarious purposes.