The Extremist at the State Department is Doing Exactly What We Thought He Would

Explaining the latest Trump Administration enemies list (yes, another one)

This week, the MIT Technology Review reported that the State Department is in the middle of “a sweeping effort to uncover all communications between the staff of a small government office focused on online disinformation and a lengthy list of public and private figures—many of whom are longtime targets of the political right.” The Department’s intention is to release these communications to the public in a “Twitter Files”-style document dump.

Like the so-called “Twitter Files,” this effort will be another charade that is high on fantasy and low on facts. It will paint the Trump administration and the hand-selected “journalists” who will “report” on the documents as heroes. It will upend the lives of many of the list’s targets, especially those who have not been smeared by the right-wing lie machine before. It will conveniently enrich those who cover its salacious lies with sweet, sweet subscription dollars and distract the public from the very real assaults on the First Amendment Trump 2.0 is undertaking.

I’m one of the 39 individuals on the list. It seems the Trump folks—like the Nazis, Soviets, and Nixon administration—love making them. I’m on Kash Patel’s enemies list and one created by a crazy extremist with ties to Michael Flynn, too.

I have been the folk villain in the elaborate tale of alleged right-wing censorship for the past three years, all because I have researched disinformation for the past decade and took a job in the Biden Administration in my area of expertise. My work in and out of government was widely lied about. I’ve been around for every extremely dumb twist and turn of the “censorship” conspiracy theories. If you’re just joining, welcome.

The release of these internal communications is an unprecedented abuse of access to federal records, overseen by a white supremacist, misogynist conspiracy theorist whose personal animus motivates him to lie about those who have previously exposed his nonsense.

His lies have the potential to bring serious personal, professional, and security consequences for those targeted, and they’re leaving our nation more exposed to foreign interference than ever.

But we have the power to stop them in their tracks. We know the playbook they’re about to follow. I’ve laid it out below, so when you see it in the wild, or when Crazy Uncle Larry starts quoting it at your Memorial Day barbecue, you can push back.

To make sure more people see this, hit the heart above and share it with everyone who cares about the truth. Let’s get to work.

Behind the Records Request

On March 11, the Acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, Darren Beattie—whose job is repairing America’s tattered image, not engaging in domestic political warfare—issued a memo requesting a wide swath of records from an office that had worked to counter foreign disinformation and propaganda. From 2017 to late 2024, that office was known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC). Late last year, under pressure from Republicans, funding for the GEC was slashed and the office was closed. Some of the GEC’s staff were reassigned to a new office in State’s Public Diplomacy (known in Departmental parlance as “R”) Bureau: the office of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI). That office also became the target of conservative ire, and was the topic of the April Congressional hearing in which I testified.

MAGA conspiracy grifters allege that the GEC, along with a whole host of other government agencies, had been in cahoots with academic and professional researchers to “censor” conservatives. (It would indeed be a bad thing if the government did coerce platforms to remove Americans' speech, but it didn't. More on that later.)

Enter Beattie’s document request. The Acting Under Secretary has instructed State’s Department of Administration—which handles, among other things, Freedom of Information Act requests that usually come from outside of the government—to provide:

• A list of all grants, subgrants, and cooperative agreements, and their respective implementers, that the GEC was involved with since 2017;

• All documents and correspondence that references a list of 16 media and civil society organizations;

• All documents and correspondence between or referencing a list of 39 individuals, including yours truly;

• All communications and documents that reference a long list of right-wing politicians and influencers—including Beattie himself—and right-wing buzzwords, including “incels,” “color revolution,” and “Pepe the frog.”

What will the State Department do with the records?

According Eileen Guo’s report for the MIT Technology Review, Beattie:

“told State Department officials that his goal in seeking these records was a “Twitter files”-like release of internal State Department documents “to rebuild trust with the American public,” according to a State Department employee who heard the remarks.”

If you missed the Twitter Files, or simply stopped paying attention because it failed to deliver on its promise to expose the (made-up) “censorship industrial complex,” you’re not alone.

Here’s how the Twitter Files playbook works:

• Conspiracy theorist gets access to internal records of a large, embattled organization;

• Conspiracy theorist and hand-picked “journalists” use access to selectively identify records that they claim “prove” their censorship theory;

• Records are sliced, diced, and stripped of nuance and context to suggest impropriety or illegality;

• High-follower accounts like Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and POTUS, as well as the extremist media ecosystem, breathlessly amplify the claims without attempting to contextualize or fact-check them;

• Allegations made through records releases drive investigations, harassment, and threats to those falsely implicated.

…and round and round we go.

Is there any truth to these allegations?

At a recent televised Cabinet meeting, overflowing with Soviet-style obsequious subservience, Marco Rubio falsely claimed that “we had an office in the Department of State whose job it was to censor Americans.” Rubio presented this allegation at the meeting, and in multiple pieces of fan fiction released since then, as a “gotcha” moment.

But it’s not the gotcha Rubio thinks it is. As Ben Shultz, the lead researcher at my non-profit, The American Sunlight Project, wrote recently:

The GEC’s mandate was clear—it was created originally to combat ISIS propaganda and recruitment online. Its mission was expanded in the 2017 [National Defense Authorization Act]—which Rubio voted for—to include addressing other foreign propaganda, disinformation, or influence operations. Its mandate had been refunded by Congress multiple times—on a bipartisan basis—thereafter. Even more hypocritical is the fact that an overwhelming amount of the transgressions Rubio claims to be outraged about happened under the watch of Trump appointee—and former Fox News commentator—Lea Gabrielle, who led the GEC from 2019–2021.

Facts do not deter the modern Republican party, however, especially as it’s searching for the smoking gun to finally prove its “censorship” theories which have been excoriated in the Supreme Court and beyond.

Rubio, Beattie and others have falsely claimed that the GEC funded two non-profits to create conservative “blacklists.” What really happened? The GEC, as part of its mission, gave small grants to organizations researching foreign disinformation and its impact on Americans and American foreign policy. Two of these organizations, the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard, received small grants to track Chinese Communist Party propaganda. They also ranked the reliability and trustworthiness of news websites for consumers and advertisers. Their China work and ranking work were separate projects, with separate funding streams, but the MAGA crowd claims that funding for narrowly-scoped projects about China, awarded during the first Trump administration, somehow funded a censorship regime costing their bunk “news” outlets millions in ad revenue.

In a March 2025 court ruling that deeply undermines the foundational premises of both the GEC claim as well as those of the broader “censorship industrial complex” narrative, a New York Federal judge dismissed a lawsuit alleging that the U.S. government censored them via NewsGuard's reliability rankings. The Court laid out that the bar for state censorship would require that the “Government controlled NewsGuard’s decision-making process and internal operations” for this project which, as noted above, it absolutely did not. The ruling separately noted that mere commentary on the reliability of content, even if made by a state actor, would be “a far cry from the threat of adverse government action” in violation of the First Amendment and would rather be “at most, merely criticiz[ing] [Plaintiff’s] beliefs … forcefully in the hopes of persuading others.”

Rubio’s claims of COVID-era “censorship” are also bunk. In an op-ed in The Federalist announcing the closure of the GEC’s successor office, as my colleague Ben writes, the Secretary of State took:

“particular issue with GEC’s warnings in 2020—which, to remind everyone, was when Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, was in office—that hostile foreign actors like Russia were pushing COVID-related disinformation. But as even he admits, the GEC never censored any content—it merely sent certain posts ‘to social media companies for ‘review.’’ Social media companies then made their own decisions according to their terms of service.”

The conservative-majority Supreme Court didn’t even support these theories. In 2022, “censorship” truthers led by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana brought a case (Missouri v. Biden, later Murthy v Missouri) against a wide range of Biden Administration officials (inclusive of yours truly—I was swiftly removed from the list of defendants) claiming that the Biden administration had coerced social media platforms to censor conservative content online. That case was appealed up to the Supreme Court, and it was dismissed for lack of standing 6-3 in an opinion that Amy Coney Barrett—hardly a liberal firebrand—authored. The Court found no “harm done to anyone by the US Government when it flagged content to Meta which violated Meta’s terms of service. In fact, the plaintiffs in Murthy couldn't name a single piece of content that had been ‘ordered’ down by the GEC or any other federal agency invoked in the suit,” as Ben writes.

What’s the deal with this Darren Beattie guy?

Darren Beattie is the Acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy. The “Acting” in his title is important. He’s serving in a role that would require Senate confirmation, and even in a world where the Republican-led Senate is pretty much rubber stamping every Trump nominee, the Trump Administration made Beattie an “Acting” Under Secretary, recognizing they might face an uphill confirmation battle with his candidacy. Why? Even by the nearly nonexistent standards of the second Trump Administration, Beattie is profoundly unfit and unqualified for public service:

• Beattie got fired from his role as a speechwriter in the first Trump administration after he gave a speech at a white supremacist conference.

• He has openly posted misogynist, racist content, regularly harassed women and black people, and even celebrated the January 6 insurrection.

• He founded extremist media outlet Revolver, which served as the distributor for some of his craziest conspiracies, including that Biden’s 2020 election win was a “color revolution,” a term that has become Putin’s dogwhistle for alleged US intelligence agency interference when a popular protest movement takes a country in Moscow’s orbit farther away from Mother Russia.¹ In Beattie’s world, Biden’s popular support was an intelligence operation, and January 6 was a false flag. Laura K. Field excoriated Revolver and Beattie at length in The Bulwark for “moving goalposts, perverse inversions, incoherence: the marks of morally and intellectually unserious individuals who either have no integrity or sacrifice it in order to kiss up to the likes of Bannon, Carlson, and Trump.”²

Who is being targeted, and who is being protected?

From MIT’s reporting, we know that Beattie’s targets include:

• Disinformation researchers and research institutions: myself, Renee DiResta, Clint Watts, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, the Stanford Internet Observatory;

• Commentators, journalists, and journalism organizations: Anne Applebaum, Bill Kristol, Brandy Zadrozny, open-source investigative outlet Bellingcat;

• Government entities and former government officials: DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and its Trump-era Director, Chris Krebs; former Ambassador to Poland Dan Fried, who has been active in writing and commenting on disinformation since his retirement from the State Department;

• Foreign government officials: Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister;

• Any organization that has ever received a grant from or entered into a cooperative agreement with the Global Engagement Center.

Beattie is also looking for a trove of information about his personal friends and other people he wants to “protect” from “censorship.” His memo includes a long list of right-wing individuals and “independent” bloggers who have been involved with the censorship lie. These include:

• Right-wing politicians: Trump and members of his family, Bolsonaro, Imran Khan, Nigel Farage, RFK Jr, Marine Le Pen (the only woman listed who is not a target; isn’t that interesting?);

• Conservative commentators: Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk, Dan Bongino, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson;

• His pals who also promote the censorship lie: Matt Taibbi, Jack Posobiec, Glenn Greenwald, Mike Benz;

• Beattie himself 🤡

Finally, Beattie is seeking material on a list of keywords including, Qanon, “election denier,” “vaccine skeptic” BLM, and Pepe the Frog. Among them are two of his pet interests: “color revolution” (described above and in a footnote) and “Integrity Initiative,” the name of an inane conspiracy that claims because a bunch of disinformation researchers’ and journalists’ names appeared in the contact lists³ for a program of a little known British think tank that we are all part of some cabal to conduct thought control exercises (or something. It’s exceedingly dumb and makes my brain melt when I try to explain it).

Taken together, the motivation behind the memo is pretty clear: Weird guys hold weird grudges. The presence on his target list of women like Brandy Zadrozny, a journalist whose coverage he didn’t like, and who he’s tweeted about dozens of times in misogynistic and abusive ways, really gives away the game here. Darren Beattie isn’t trying to uncover any impropriety. The memo represents the juvenile Twitter beefs of a broken man.

Why aren’t they looking into social media platforms?

Two reasons. First, remember that this isn’t a good faith inquiry. Second, even though the right-wing spent years complaining about “collusion” between the tech platforms and the government, the Trump Administration has now captured Silicon Valley. The MAGA movement is not interested in if or whether the social media platforms coordinated with the GEC or anyone else, because the social media platforms are currently doing Trump’s bidding. Musk, Zuckerberg, and all the other tech executives have paid for political campaigns, made contributions to Trump events, settled lawsuits, and rolled back content moderation policies as part of this social media protection racket. If the Beattie memo is an indication of the thinking inside the administration, it’s working out well for Big Tech.

Why is the Trump Administration doing this?

Other than Beattie’s mission to get payback for all the times he has been fact-checked and told his views are repugnant, there’s a couple of motivations:

• Distraction: If the Trump Administration is able to create unending news about the false narrative of GEC censorship, this time using “never before seen” documents, they hope the American people—and crucially, their supporters—will look away from the full-scale assault on the First Amendment Trump is currently leading.

• Profit: There’s a lot of money to be made pushing shocking conspiracies about government overreach. All of the individuals and organizations involved in making the censorship lie official State Department policy—from Darren Beattie’s own Revolver to the Substack blogs from individuals like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, to corporate outlets like Fox News—have cashed in on it because it enriches them. Individuals like Taibbi and Shellenberger may be making six figures a month pushing these lies. We wrote about this cycle and the profit it makes those involved in a report last summer. Whether online or on TV, the most engaging content is often the most enraging content, and the censorship lie delivers on both counts.

• Power: I can’t explain Marco Rubio’s participation in this charade (or the Zelenskyy Oval Office meeting during which he clearly wanted to disappear into the couch, for that matter) any way other than a lust for power. Rubio hopes to inherit the Trump empire, perhaps after JD Vance is done with it. He can only do that by eating a giant shit sandwich every day. Recently, that shit sandwich has had censorship seasoning.

Isn’t transparency a good thing? Why is this abnormal and anti-democratic?

No one is against transparency, but there are processes that typically enable it—and ensure it isn’t weaponized for political purposes—in massive bureaucracies like the State Department.

If Beattie, Rubio, or the Trump Administration writ large had concerns about the GEC, they could launch an investigation through the State Department Inspector General. Matt Armstrong, a former Governor on the Broadcasting Board of Governors (now the US Agency for Global Media), told me in an email: “A functioning [Inspector General] could get into these emails, conduct interviews, and report on the issues with statutory authority and gravitas. This is an example of this administration looking backwards, not forwards, embracing Russian disinformation, and helping their Russian friends.”

This also is not a typical “fourth-estate holds government accountable via the Freedom of Information Act” exercise (though the Washington Free Beacon’s paragon of intellect Chuck Ross interpreted it that way) by which journalists request government documents of their own accord and then conduct investigations based on them without a government minder peering over their shoulder. Anyone who accepts documents from Beattie will tacitly understand what the conclusion they must reach—“State Department effort uncovers massive censorship regime”—in order to retain Beattie and the Trump administration’s favor and not get yeeted from the press pool or scrambling for administration access.

Now begins the search for the evidence. Usually investigations go the other way around.

What happens next?

Beattie either handpicks a “journalist” or two to run with this “investigation,” or he’ll just dump the documents (likely poorly or minimally redacted) on the State Department’s website for the class of influencers that live off the censorship lie to run with as they please.

Either way, a thousand new conspiracy theories will spawn.

It doesn't really matter if there's any meaningful evidence in any of the documents. The modern internet mob does not need anything anywhere near a smoking gun.

Individuals who have not been targeted before—particularly those who are or were career civil servants, or less public-facing researchers—may find themselves doxxed, abused, or threatened.

Others may find themselves the target of federal investigations, IRS audits, or other forms of government harassment.

Our nation’s response to the very real threats we face from foreign disinformation and influence campaigns will be stunted at best.

The Trump administration and its online mercenaries will attempt a victory lap—but it’s not a foregone conclusion. You know what’s coming, and you can engage in robust conversations with those you encounter who are bought into the censorship lie.

Thank you for your support—we’re going to need it.

1. The term has an agreed upon meaning in political science that is, of course, very much the opposite of what Putin—and Beattie—say it is: color revolutions are non-violent protest movements that topple semi-autocratic political systems. They often take their “branding” from a color—e.g. Ukraine's Orange Revolution or Georgia’s Rose Revolution. Mike McFaul wrote a definitional piece on their characteristics back in 2005: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/transitions-from-postcommunism/

2. “Intellectually unserious” is an understatement. In September 2020, Beattie led the first major networked harassment campaign against me because I, a little-known researcher at the time, dared to debunk and denounce his inane "color revolution" conspiracy theory. He accused me of "running interference" for the “color revolution” alongside attempting to smear me via a bizarre and creepy fixation around the band I started while I was in high school. He continued his juvenile and sexist obsession with me—and with other women on his current target list—throughout the years as the manufactured “censorship” crisis grew, publishing long screeds of unhinged “deep state” theories based on evidence that only makes sense if you’re on whatever fuels these guys’ late night tweet storms.

3. I attended one event that the Integrity Initiative ran in 2017. I guess I ended up on their mailing list after that. That’s all I know about this program, but to Beattie and his ilk this is hard proof of his deranged conspiracy theories.