Whatever Happened to Frame Game Radio?

1,292 words

I woke up Sunday morning and logged into Twitter — or whatever it’s called this week — to find Charlie Kirk and NBC reporter Brandy Zadrozny arguing about an article I wrote for Counter-Currents five years ago.  The article in question was an interview I did with a character who went by Frame Game Radio, or Frame Games.

Wait — Frame Game Radio just got doxed? I’ve always wondered what happened to the guy.

The year was 2018, the Golden Age of White Nationalist YouTube. Internet bloodsports was the hot new craze, and the Alt Right was making tremendous strides in reaching new audiences. During this period Frame Game Radio, a Meme War veteran who had hitherto only been a popular Alt Right Twitter star, emerged as one of the brightest and most controversial new personalities in the post-Charlottesville era. His work often involved deconstructing Leftist propaganda and dissecting how they “frame the issue,” which is where the “Frame Games” name came from.

The controversy about Frame Game Radio (FRG) centered on the fact that he is Jewish. It’s not that he was soft on any of the issues, or “White Nationalist with the Jew stuff.” He wasn’t like Nathan Cofnas, who endorses race realism but obfuscates the Jewish Question. He was a full-blown White Nationalist who checked all the boxes — race realism, white genocide, the JQ, Holocaust revisionism, etc. — but just so happened to be Jewish. At the time, many of the Alt Right wanted a “No Jews, no matter how based, no exceptions” rule, and so there were a lot of conflicted feelings between this and the peerless quality of FRG’s work.

Some specialize in talking, some in writing, and some in making audiovisual content, but Frame Game Radio did it all, and it was all very good. Frame Game came around when much of the discussion concerned what people wanted our end goal to look like — a theoretical ethnostate — and there were many debates about what kind of government there should be, and whether or not such-and-such would be legal there. In my opinion, Frame Game Radio’s major contribution to the discussion was that he rather put the focus on “What should the first step forward be?”

One might argue that Frame Game Radio’s popularity was an offshoot of the then boiling Optics War, as he was one of the first to pioneer a normie-friendly approach to White Nationalism even before Nick Fuentes. Comparisons to David Cole abounded.

Frame Game became a popular guest on the YouTube circuit and rose to become a weekly co-host on JF Gariepy’s channel, where he did deep dives into complex subjects such as white genocide, the Zionist lobby, and the 2008 financial crisis. While he was on point on these issues, he took a very different approach than most of the Alt Right at the time by analyzing the topics from a legal and corporate perspective. He was looking into the Anti-Defamation League before it was cool, for example.

Some samples of his work.

Frame Game on Breitbart and Alinsky

Frame Game stopped short of advocating for the white ethnostate his interviewers wanted. But he said and wrote some noxious things. A lot of them. Like this. Maybe most often about the ADL, which he called “the Jewish censorship squad.” pic.twitter.com/80FjujF4Ci

— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) October 6, 2023

My favorite of his videos was one he did on white genocide in Britain, where he overlaid a speech by Kai Murros over images of racial and societal decay.

If Frame Game Radio was “soft” on anything, it’s that he didn’t believe in an ethnostate, or rather that even if such a thing were possible, it would not happen in his lifetime, so it was a non-issue for him personally.

Then, sometime around 2018, FGR vanished almost as suddenly as he had arrived. I used to talk to him a bit, and my understanding was that he was worried that he was about to be doxed. He had dropped the odd biographical detail here and there, and had made a big enough splash to have acquired some stalkers who were hellbent on unmasking him. He was also questioning whether being a content creator was the best way for him to advance the cause, and that he might do more good in a behind-the-scenes capacity.

Once during a livestream, Frame Game Radio accidentally revealed his Facebook profile picture.

On October 6, FRG was at last doxed as Michael Benz, and his credentials are most impressive. He had worked his way into a job at the United States State Department and had been a speechwriter for Ben Carson. More recently, he has become an anti-censorship activist who is popular within mainstream conservative circles, so much so that even Charlie Kirk is now willing to go to the mat for him.

After the dox, it came to light that Richard Spencer had already subliminally doxed Benz a few days prior, after Benz had appeared on Tim Pool’s show.

So why now? Why did it take five years to dox Benz? It would appear that he had started flying too close to the Sun. Elon Musk had recently been interacting with Benz’s normie Twitter account. Having the ear of the richest man in the world made him more dangerous by an order of magnitude.

Benz has responded to the controversy by claiming that Frame Game Radio was a deradicalization op to make people stop hating Jews.

I’m not sure what to think. Back in 2017, there was a woman in Richard Spencer’s entourage who was doxed after appearing in a TV news story about Spencer. She freaked out and started claiming that she was actually an antifa researcher and had infiltrated the Alt Right because she was intending to write a book on the evil Nazis. To help sell the lie, she started randomly doxing people she had been talking to. Those people responded by posting the nude pictures that she had been sending to everyone. To my knowledge, her book on evil Nazis has never materialized. Thus, if Mike Benz is lying about his involvement in the Alt Right being an op, it would not be the first time someone has tried this approach.

You can buy The Alternative Right, ed. Greg Johnson, here

That said, his claim that there had been a team of people behind Frame Game Radio is plausible. I was staggered at his ability to edit videos, conduct vast amounts of research, and make multiple livestream appearances a week while holding down a full-time job.

His assertion that “I was trying to make people hate Jews less” does have the ring of truth — sort of. He never tried to debunk any JQ talking points, which is what most people would assume that someone who says he was trying to make anti-Semites hate Jews less would be doing. Frame Game’s message was rather that Jews are in the same boat as white gentiles, whether they like it or not, and that when white genocide hits, the new brown majority will make no distinction between Jew and gentile. The “op,” to the extent that there was one, was thus to show that Jews can — at least in theory — be allies in the White Nationalist cause. If a Jew wants to make the goyim hate Jews less, being the best nationalist you can be is my preferred way for them to do it.

The irony is that in his 2018 heyday, there were conspiracy theories which claimed that Frame Game Radio was not in fact Jewish and that it was an op to make Jews look bad. A Jew had a blog at the time where he outlined many different reasons as to why FGR was not who he said he was, and claiming to prove that he is not Jewish. Apparently, he got some minute details of the Jewish religion wrong. In fact, one of the theories for FGR’s disappearance was that he was about to be exposed for not being Jewish.

Op or not, Benz did and continues to do good work, and I don’t think any of these revelations invalidate it.

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