(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) While the work of Headline USA continues to bring honest information from a perspective that seeks actively to counter or debunk mainstream-media bias, this week I am formally announcing my “retirement” after six-plus years at the website, more than half of which I spent as its editor-in-chief.
Our star reporter, Ken Silva, will assume that mantle and bring his own vision to both the content and business aspects that we hope will help further to elevate Headline USA to prominence in an ever-growing field of conservative-friendly media where we find many friends, allies and role models, as well as competitors and copycats.
My journey here has been a deeply fulfilling experience—yet, having made my mark and (in the spirit of Sunday’s Super Bowl) driven the ball as far downfield as I can, it is time to pass it to a trusted teammate.
Nonetheless, I do so with the comfort of knowing that many of the wrongs I sought to right have ended in vindication—or, at least, they soon will due to Trump 2.0: a more savvy political machine than the original that now boasts the resources, infrastructure and mandate to drain the Swamp, hold the Deep State accountable and set the United States on a much needed course correction.
As for me, I will return to my nonpartisan roots as the executive director of an up-and-coming nonprofit organization that seeks to promote ideological diversity and free speech in higher education. But with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency having recently put the shadowy CIA piggybank USAID in its crosshairs, it is worthwhile to reflect back on why and how my foray into political journalism first began.
IMBALANCE OF POWER
The early stages of my journalism career, for the most part, involved feature stories and entertainment coverage, but there were a few rare moments when I was thrust into the political arena.
One of those was a February 2008 speech by Obama surrogates Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein that was hosted by the University of Mary Washington. I had the misfortune of being the “weekend duty” reporter (a task all newsroom reporters were assigned to in a regular rotation), although I probably welcomed the change of pace from my usual fare of trying to make local musicians seem like the “next big thing.”
At the time, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was locked in a nasty primary brawl with Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. However, I correctly assumed that the two speakers that day were on a trajectory to becoming major political players—even if it would be another 17 years before my brush with infamy became fully realized.
Sunstein was a colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago law school whose claim to fame was promoting the idea of an “availability cascade” to effect radical change incrementally. His brand of political opportunism is not unlike what has been referred to as the “Overton window,” although in Sunstein’s view, it can—and should—be deliberately engineered, applying a Marxist “ends justifies the means” lens rather than waiting for drastic shifts in public policy to happen organically.
Power was a Harvard government professor who would later become Obama’s United Nations ambassador, joining Susan Rice and Lisa Monaco as part of what Politico and others dubbed Obama’s foreign policy “power trio.”
All three would go on to wield immense influence during the Biden administration (although it remains unclear exactly who was running what), despite never having been elected or confirmed by the U.S. Senate. In fact, Biden specifically crafted a new role for Rice (setting a precedent that President Donald Trump would follow with Musk and “border czar” Tom Homan) in order to circumvent what was likely to be an uphill battle for confirmation in an evenly-split Senate.
ROAD TO NOWHERE
Power and Sunstein—two lofty academics who also happened to be lovebirds—callously left their audience, mostly comprising faithful student volunteers for the Obama campaign, waiting for at least an hour past the event’s start time. They claimed to have been lost on the rural backroads, but for some reason that excuse rang hollow.
When they finally arrived, the two tried to paint their candidate as both a moderate populist and an erudite policy wonk.
“His sweet spot—his area of greatest comfort and security—is foreign policy,” Power claimed of Obama.
“That’s his pleasure reading at Christmastime,” she added, perhaps insinuating that the candidate who faced growing scrutiny for his association with firebrand religious leader Jeremiah Wright—and who was being clandestinely slandered as a Muslim by Clinton’s campaign—was curled by the fire partaking in some relatable yuletide R&R.
I was determined not to let my own disdain show in my writing, committed to the principle that journalists had an ethical obligation to remain neutral and objective. (As a side note, spurred by Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos,” I had registered for Virginia’s Democratic primary that year to cast my vote for Hillary Clinton, against the more dangerous and unknown threat posed by Obama—but to no avail.)
Between the long wait that undoubtedly left me fighting a tight deadline and the need to remain as sparse as possible or risk conveying my true opinions, my final product clocked in at fewer than 200 words—shorter than some of the sentences I may have written when my loquacious tendencies get the better of me.
UNEASY RIDER
For the next eight months, I went back to my culture and music beat, snagging interviews with country stars like Charlie Daniels and Trace Adkins in between the bread-and-butter profiles of local musicians.
“I like you, boy, you’re different,” Daniels told me, which I wore as a badge of honor. The “Long Haired Country Boy” singer—a one-time counterculture icon who had played at the 1977 inauguration of President Jimmy Carter—had become an outspoken critic of the Obama campaign and would continue speaking out on conservative issues until his death in 2020.
The month before the November 2008 election, with Obama already appearing to be the inevitable victor over GOP placeholder John McCain, the economy crashed, paving the way for what was then considered a massive spurt of bailout funding alongside a newly elected Democrat supermajority in Congress.
Although pitched as a stimulus infusion to help mitigate the impacts of the Great Recession, it was a blank check, basically, for Obama to implement a quasi-socialist agenda, with few of his “shovel ready” projects ever seeing the light of day.
Two years later, the impacts of lost advertising dollars caught up with local newspapers, and my career as a features writer at a legacy local media outlet came to a halt.
UNMASKED AND UNHINGED
I spent the next decade as a classroom teacher, trying to promote those same values of objectivity and newsroom ethics that had been impressed upon me to the next generation of journalists. But with the election of Donald Trump, the entire veneer of media objectivity was abruptly dismantled.
Already, Wikileaks had exposed so-called journalists like Glenn Thrush, who was caught actively colluding with the Clinton campaign to vet his stories ahead of publication at Politico.
Thrush faced no consequences to speak of. Instead, just two months later, in December 2016, he was hired by the New York Times.
Little unnerving — but fascinating to be in the middle of a ginned-up, self-serving shit-storm pushed by fake, in-the-bag partisan media.
— Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) October 17, 2016
Rather than attempting paltry, half-hearted excuses for their failures to live up to the time-honored standards, newsrooms like the New York Times, CNN and many others began offering full-throated justifications for their lopsided coverage, insisting that it would be irresponsible to “normalize” Trump.
I realized then that my mission had been redefined. I had a moral duty to challenge the media malpractice and propaganda—much of which clearly seemed to have been sourced by operatives within the D.C. intelligence community—not by urging neutrality, but by fighting back in kind.
In 2018, I undertook yet another career switch, joining the ranks of the nascent conservative-media movement for Liberty Headlines, the precursor to Headline USA.
On a personal level, the job has given me the opportunity to experience firsthand the sort of brushes with history and greatness that I might only have dreamed of in my early days as a newsroom reporter, including several front-row seats to see President Donald Trump speak from the “press pen.”
Headline USA also has made a small but significant blip on the media map, even taking a prominent supporting role in a preposterous Mother Jones smear attack on rising stars Karoline Leavitt and Natalie Winters.
But even as we flourished, the country itself languished under the deep state’s boot. In the years that followed, the mainstream media outlook only grew bleaker as the lies grew bolder and more brazen.
SHADOW WAR ON DEMOCRACY
The corruption culminated in the 2020 election, which even Time magazine writer Molly Ball credited to the collective efforts of a “shadow campaign.”
It relied a “cabal” of activist organizations, lawfare operatives, media, corporations and public institutions to wage a de-facto domestic color revolution, similar to those supported by the CIA in foreign nations whose interests were misaligned with U.S. global objectives.
The secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 electionhttps://t.co/xG3S60cP2L
— TIME (@TIME) February 5, 2021
The concept was not altogether unfamiliar, since the same tactics had reportedly been used on Ukraine in 2014, as the Obama administration sought to wrest control of the former Soviet nation—strategically important for both energy and food supplies (as well as other things)—from the Kremlin.
As it turned out, then-Vice President Joe Biden had been appointed to oversee the U.S. relations with the new puppet government, and had taken full advantage of the situation to cash in for his own personal gain.
But the subsequent efforts by Trump to force an investigation into those allegations of corruption were instead weaponized into a highly contrived impeachment proceeding against him—the first of many attempts to use the sacred institutions of justice prescribed by the U.S. Constitution and rule of law as political bludgeons against Trump and fellow Republicans.
With each failed attempt to lay cover for the Biden administration, mainstream media expended more and more credibility, until finally its influence over the public at large had dwindled to nothing when trying to sell the pop-up Kamala Harris campaign in 2024.
A KEY DISCOVERY
There is no guarantee that another pendulum swing won’t reverse all of the efforts to weed out the anti-democratic influences that threatened to turn the United States into a banana republic.
But so far, the actions taken by Trump, Musk and a bipartisan coalition of “Avengers” (including former Democrats like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) have been encouraging.
The Best Trump's Avengers MAGA Poster Yet. I hope the creator (not me) gets credit! pic.twitter.com/4FxHhcF0sv
— Dr Trumpenstein (@DoctorCanDo) December 10, 2024
Although activist judges are forcing a protracted legal battle over the defunding of government agencies where fraud is suspected of running rampant, the evidence is mounting everywhere to reveal the scope of the abuses—not to mention the trail of breadcrumbs that links them all together.
USAID was the Skelton key to unlocking all of the corruption. I’ve never seen Democrats so outraged about anything.
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) February 3, 2025
At the heart of it all, it seems, was the United States Agency for International Development. Not only was USAID shoveling billions toward egregious examples of government waste throughout the globe, but also looks to have been linked to many of the extralegal operations in geopolitical hotspots, providing the groundwork for covert missions by the CIA and other government agencies engaged in nation-building.
A lot of people, and by that I mean absolutely no one, have asked me, “What exactly is this USAID I keep hearing about?”
And this video breaks it down. Learn how billions of American dollars have been used to influence other counties.
🎥@MikeBenzCyber pic.twitter.com/Ys7DmyNYpE
— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) February 3, 2025
Among the scandals that USAID and other agencies now stand accused of:
- Funding the 2020 George Floyd race riots to create political unrest ahead of the 2020 election
- Providing the leverage for the Biden family’s illegal influence-peddling in Ukraine and elsewhere
- Orchestrating the 2019 impeachment effort against Trump for attempting to investigate Biden’s influence-peddling in Ukraine
- Funding the research that led to the COVID-19 pandemic
- Funding Hamas terrorism both before and after the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre in Israel
- Supporting the child-sex trade in developing Central American nations like Guatemala and elsewhere
- Undermining U.S. sovereignty by supporting globalist NGOs that aid and abet illegal immigration
- Supporting controversial weather-manipulation projects, such as cloud seeding
- Funneling tax dollars through leftist “philanthropy” organizations directly back into the coffers of politicians like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and oligarchs like George Soros
- Perpetuating a modern-day Operation Mockingbird by bankrolling media outlets such as Politico and the Associated Press that are known for pushing left-wing narratives
- Creating an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” to discredit and promote the censorship of dissenting views
- Brazenly stonewalling any attempts at oversight or accountability
CLEAR ROAD AHEAD
With evidence in newly hand, lawmakers are likely to demand a clear account from the person who oversaw the USAID program during the Biden administration—none other than Samantha Power.
.@RandPaul Asks Samantha Power: 'Did USAID Fund Coronavirus Research In Wuhan China?'
"Should we be funding the Academy of Military Medical Research in China? …Some of the research proposals in 2018 were the Wuhan Insitute of Virology asking for money to create a virus with a… pic.twitter.com/SZ53PzWKnq
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) February 2, 2025
This time, however, Powers won’t be able to blame the rural backroads of Virginia for giving investigators the runaround since all they have to do is follow the money—to borrow a phrase from a once-lionized Watergate “whistleblower.”
At the end of the day, even “Deep Throat” turned out to be nothing more than an ambitiously seditious FBI spook, quite possibly engaged in a massive coverup and using the very institution that was supposed to be providing checks against government corruption, the “free press,” as his weapon of choice.
Perhaps DOGE can correct the historical record once and for all. But, for now, my work here is done.
Ben Sellers is the editor emeritus of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
