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On the occasion of the end of USAID, Glenn Greenwald invited Mike Benz to his program. Mike Benz is a former Department of State agent who, a few years ago, created a libertarian NGO to denounce the Deep State’s attacks on online free speech – those transnational fact-checking programs, as well as combating “hate speech” and “misinformation”.

But Mike Benz is not like Snowden or Manning: he does not express any fear of being arrested in the U.S. and, on the contrary, has broad support from the oligarchs of the libertarian right. Excerpts of his interviews are released by Elon Musk and his network of Twitter users. In Brazil, Bolsonaro supporters have been using these same excerpts to prove that USAID was practically an infiltrated communist agency, and that is why it interfered in the Brazilian elections against Bolsonaro. With Trump’s return, the U.S. would once again be a trustworthy country. So trustworthy that Bolsonaro promised them a military base in the Triple Frontier and the withdrawal of the BRICS, if he comes back to presidency. In fact, USAID interfered with the Electoral Court in the last Brazilian presidential election, under the pretext of “fighting misinformation”. The demand for greater auditability of the ballot boxes, a Bolsonarista’s demand, was categorized as misinformation.

But let’s come back to Greenwald. His interviewee Mike Benz said that the revelation about the true nature of USAID (to wit, that it is not a charity, but rather an appendage of the CIA focused on espionage and coups d’état) would cause much more damage outside the U.S. than inside, since foreign countries would lose trust and might prefer Russia and China as allies. Greenwald replies that this revelation was only a surprise to the domestic U.S. public, because abroad it has been known for a long time. In my opinion, Greenwald is completely correct. In Brazil, since the 1960s (when it was created) it has been known that USAID is an arm of U.S. intelligence. Among First World labor and conservatives, there may be a lot of sympathy for the first Catholic president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. In Latin America, however, his presidency is associated with coups d’état aimed at imposing liberal dictatorships. (In Brazil, there was a kind of counter-coup, and nationalist military forces steered the country in a direction quite different from the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile.)

In fact, the nature of USAID was better known abroad than at home. I think only two types of people were greatly surprised by the discovery: the American taxpayer, given the magnitude of the sums spent on such random things as Indian sex reassignment and Serbian gay activism; and the anti-communist foreigners (like Milei’s fan club), who will have to digest the fact that “cultural Marxism” or wokeism comes from the United States – not from communist China, much less from post-Soviet Russia.

Still, the USAID scandal should prompt a reflection for all those, inside and outside the United States, who have felt affected by wokeism. The reflection is that absolute free speech is a farce, because those who pay the biggest sum impose a single discourse on society and ostracize dissent. Wokeism shows that censorship is exercised efficiently by private means. Cancel culture is nothing more than a beefed-up update of the blacklisting practice from the McCarthy era. It is very beefed up, because if blacklisting persecuted artists suspected of communism, cancel culture persecutes any middle-class professional who challenges a completely crazy orthodoxy, according to which women have penises and hating white people is anti-racism.

People have lost their jobs for not adhering to the new orthodoxy, even though it had no popular support. In fact – and this is what interests us – a good part of the opinions that are exported from the United States can be, or even were, criminal. Brazil had a long legislative history that prohibited any type of racism, including anti-white racism. Unfortunately, this tradition went down the drain thanks to a wonderful invention of U.S. imperialism: judicial activism. Without a vote, without a law, the Supreme Court changed the interpretation of the laws to invert their meaning. In any case, what I wanted to highlight is that society always creates censorship of opinions and publications understood as harmful: racism, drug advocacy, pornography… Often, these laws clash with market interests.

The sexual issues of wokeism, which tend to normalize all types of paraphilia, recall the tension that is perhaps the oldest: laws against pornography versus publications like Playboy or, nowadays, websites like Pornhub. As far as I know, every Western country, including the United States, has or had laws against pornography. However, commercial pressure makes any law a dead letter – at least in countries under the sphere of influence of the U.S.

From the days of Playboy to today, things have gotten so bad that there is no longer even a social consensus on the need to put up barriers to children’s access to Pornhub – witness the departure of Rabbi Solomon Friedman’s company from the state of Florida for not accepting the age verification required by a new law. Right-wingers usually say that parents should be responsible for their children, instead of calling for censorship. (I used to work for a right-wing newspaper and that was the tenor of the comments when I addressed the issue.) This is just another sign of the changing times, because by this logic it makes no sense to prohibit drugs, after all parents have to educate their children, etc. Since the pro-drug agenda was given a left-wing stamp in the 1960s, the right-wing is not adhering to it for that reason alone. (But there has been no shortage of attempts, since William F. Buckley Jr., poster boy for American conservatism, was in favor of legalizing drugs.) Even so, songs praising drugs have become normalized throughout the West, despite laws against it.

We see that there are laws backed by popular support that are unable to be enforced. If things are already this bad, imagine without them at all. And that is precisely what libertarians want: to sacralize and export the First Amendment. Today, the monomania of Bolsonaro supporters in Brazil is “free speech,” as if the right to curse on Twitter were the national salvation, and as if we didn’t have problems like the handover of 14% of the national territory to transnational capital. And it is this mentality that is fostered by Mike Benz and his patrons. More than a mentality, it is an agenda: to get everyone to defend the freedom of drug dealers to finance propagandists and the freedom of Rabbi Solomon Friedman to make pornography available for free to minors.