More on the Information War: Trump Administration Aims to Be Sole Arbiter of Truth
And guess what? There's a Russia angle!
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ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT!
Lately, it seems, there is so much bad stuff happening, it is hard to keep track. That’s part of the point, of course: “flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon has advocated. None of us has the bandwidth to follow everything, everywhere, all at once. Sometimes, we need to step back and focus on narrow developments.
Hence, this week, I’d like to look at the shutting down of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which had been renamed Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub. This office, in the Before Times, was charged with tracking and countering foreign malign information campaigns. It was set up in response to influence operations that targeted the United States. You know, like the 2016 Russian attack on our elections.
Indeed, then-Senator Marco Rubio signed off in 2020 on a bipartisan Senate Intelligence report highlighting the threats posed by Russian information manipulation and interference in our elections. As the report concluded:
[T]he Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modem era.
In the current Bizzare-O World End Times (BWET™️), now Secretary of State Rubio has erased all memory of that report. He gutted the Global Engagement Center—which was meant to counter such attacks—in April.
In typical Trump administration fashion, he inverted the truth while doing so. (For background on Trump’s inversion of truth, see here, here, here, and here.)
While, in fact, the office had been tracking and countering Russian, Chinese, and Iranian information operations, Rubio and Trump reframed that work as attacks on free speech. The executive order declaring the end of the office accused it of censoring conservative speech:
Under the guise of combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate. Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.
So, by their own logic, countering Russian information operations equals censoring conservative speech. Ergo, there is an alignment between conservative speech and Russian malinformation.
Just to be clear: there is a difference between saying something, and saying something because a foreign adversarial intelligence agency is paying you to say that. One is free speech; the other is not. I’m not sure why this is a controversial comment, but apparently it is.
As the EU DisinfoLab pointed out last month, the move to shut the office sets off a number of serious alarms:
Trump appointee at the State Department Darren Beattie—a former White House speechwriter and founder of the far-right outlet Revolver News—initiated a sweeping and targeted effort to expose internal communications from a State Department office tasked with countering foreign disinformation. Modelled after the “Twitter Files” playbook, Beattie’s request sought unredacted emails referencing dozens of journalists, researchers, and critics of Trump - many long vilified in right-wing media. Framed as a transparency effort, the operation amounts to a politically driven dragnet with serious risks of harassment, retaliation, and exposure of individuals and sensitive grantees. Experts warn the move is designed to produce a chilling effect on those researching disinformation and protecting democratic discourse - undermining oversight while fueling narratives of institutional censorship.
In short, rather than countering the foreign information manipulation, the administration is now taking aim at the people who were trying to counter foreign information manipulation, labeling them as censors and critics of Trump. (That is: if I try to counter Russian influence, I am against Trump. Weird, right?)
I’ll take “Probably Just a Coincidence” for $500, Alex
A little background on Darren Beattie that I am sure you never saw coming: He has significant personal ties to Vladimir Putin and has openly voiced views very much aligned with those of the Kremlin.
Beattie is married to a Russian woman whose uncle has held several positions in Russian politics and once received a personal thank you message from Putin for his help in the campaign that brought Putin to power. He has also publicly praised Putin, saying Western institutions should be “infiltrated” by Putin, and attacked the “globalist American empire.”
The I in MICE
As we’ve talked a lot about here at Rant!: the four main motivations people look for when trying to manipulate others are Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego (MICE) (see Class 1 of my Foreign Influence Operations course for more.) The great thing about finding someone ideologically aligned with you is that it takes very little to manipulate them; they already agree with you!
Trump is clearly aligned with the notion of manipulating the information space in his favor. Is it because he is a Russian asset, tasked to do that and Beattie is his tool? No, it’s because these guys think this is the right way to run things, because they believe they should have all the power. But their belief in that is an asset to Russia, because it works contrary to democracy and sets the US farther on the authoritarian path.
Again, from EU DisinfoLab:
Within President Donald Trump's first 100 days in office, the United States has cut funding and shut down agencies focused on disinformation research and foreign influence operations. More precisely, social media platforms have scaled back content moderation, while the National Science Foundation cancelled hundreds of research grants related to media literacy, counter-disinformation, diversity, equity, and inclusion. This could trigger national security risks, with Russia and China having more freedom to sow disinformation and intensify foreign influence and interference. On the other hand, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has pushed to revitalise the notion of ‘news distortion’, launching inquiries against ABC and CBS news channels, and threatening other outlets on the grounds of dissatisfactory coverage. Conservative organisations have asked for the termination of these inquiries, labelling them as “regulatory overreach”.
This is all part of Trump’s authoritarian play to make himself the sole arbiter of truth (go see all those links above for more).
The information space remains a central battlefield in the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. This attack on the Global Engagement Center is yet another attempt to gain leverage on that battlefield.
It’s an important topic to understand because I truly believe we are running out of time to gain control over our own information ecosystems. The solutions we all know about (building critical thinking skills, media literacy, etc.) are all long-term solutions and require political leadership. What actions can we take now, absent that political leadership and, in fact, with political leadership working against us, to stop the downward spiral? I think about this question daily.
THE WEEK’S LINKS
A roundup of things you should be reading
RUSSIA AT WAR WITH THE WEST
Russia is at war with Britain and the US is no longer a reliable ally, UK adviser says (The Guardian)
‘The Fight for Souls and Minds’: Alex Jones, George Galloway, Errol Musk and More Attend Far-Right Forum of the Future in Moscow (The Moscow Times)
Telegram, the FSB, and the Man in the Middle (iStories)
AND TRUMP IS COOL WITH IT
Putin Has Won: The US Government Now Speaks His Narrative (
)AL-QAEDA BUT WHITE IN THE USA
Neo-Nazi group ‘The Base’ ‘actively seeking to grow in US’ with planned paramilitary training event (The Guardian)
EXCELLENT RESOURCES!
Just Security has launched WHAT JUST HAPPENED? as well as a litigation tracker to help readers keep up with the chaos
Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?
I came to Rant! after reading and enjoying the Victor Caro series of books. But this is far scarier than anything in those books. I think what's missing is the self-centeredness and colorful incompetence of your fictional characters.