Ex-Trump official accused of running anti-Semitic account hits back: 'The biggest fans ...were Jews'
A former Trump official revealed to be behind an apparently anti-Semitic social account published a long defense of himself Friday night, claiming “I’m a Proud Jew" and that the account was actually intended to stop hatred.
NBC News reported that Michael Benz, who served in Donald Trump’s State Department, was behind an account called Frame Game which pushed far-right narratives during the rise of extremism that followed the former president’s election.
His posts included furthering the “Great Replacement Theory,” a fascist philosophy that claims the white race is purposefully being eradicated in the U.S.
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Benz, in a long post on X following NBC’s report, called it a “hit piece” and attacked the reporter who wrote it.
“First, let me state something for the record,” he wrote.
“I’m a Jew. I’m a Proud Jew. I’m the descendant of Holocaust Survivors who fled Poland."
He went on: “I’m telling you this because one of the most notoriously unethical hit piece journalists in the entire country, Brandy Zadrozny, who is famous for constantly getting her stories wrong, just tried to write a hit piece on me that is the literal 180 degree opposite of what she wrote, and what she thinks she found.”
Though he didn’t deny being behind Frame Game, he said it was meant to stop hatred against Jews.
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“The account in question was a project by Jews to get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews. It was a deradicalization project, and it produced deradicalization material.
“It made contact with groups in the early primordial soup of the MAGA movement in 2016 and sought to move people from a place of hate and division closer to a place of love and unity. And it was successful.
"The biggest fans of this account, which was deleted around six years ago and to which I only contributed in a very limited manner, were fellow Jews who saw how effective it was at building a bridge and winning over hearts of people who held anti-Semitic beliefs, and non-Jews who would write in to say, “I’m so glad I found this account, I used to have a lot of hate and heaviness in my heart towards Jewish people, but since I discovered you, I don’t feel that anymore.”