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The Right Is Only Pretending to Be Censored

The so-called "Right" - comprised of Christofascists, Republicans prostituting themselves to them, and countless ideologues and conspiracy theorists - have several favored myths (lies, in reality) that they love to push.  One is that Christians are being persecuted when in reality the claimed persecution is merely restraints on their ability to persecute others. Another is the lie that tax cuts "pay for themselves" and that trickle down economics works as evidenced by the ballooning national debt and the ever growing wealth disparities. A third is the myth/lie that the federal government, colleges and universities and research organizations all censor the speech of "conservatives and conservative "Christians," something Fox News promotes. Of course, there is no evidence to support the claim and in the Felon's regime's quest to stamp out delusion driven imagined censorship real damage is being done to both organizations, research projects, and even American foreign policy (to the extent the Felon hasn't already destroyed it). The take away is that the political and social right seemingly have a need feel under imagined attacks even as they do to others what they decry if done to them.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this third myth and the damage being done.

For nearly a year and a half, the Trump administration prepared its case. Political appointees inside the State Department combed through old files and databases. Civil servants received notice that their personal emails would be examined. Darren Beattie—the founder of a far-right conspiracist website, then the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy—sent out a request for files on anyone who had communicated with or written about the Global Engagement Center, a now-dissolved agency that once worked to expose propaganda campaigns by Russia, China, Iran, and other countries around the world.

The request, seen last year by the MIT Technology Review, was far-reaching. Beattie was seeking information on Bill Gates; the commentator Bill Kristol; Chris Krebs, a former U.S. cybersecurity official; a German government minister; the analyst Renée DiResta, formerly at Stanford University, as well as others associated with a research project called the Election Integrity Partnership; and, as it happens, me.

This unprecedented investigation was meant to expose the Biden administration’s “censorship–industrial complex,” a shadowy network allegedly dedicated to the mass suppression of American free speech. Since 2020, internet trolls have accused Biden-administration officials, social-media companies, and university researchers of weaving a nefarious plot to censor conservatives. Since 2025, MAGA ideologues have been using this alleged plot as an excuse to dismantle government programs, stifle research, intimidate American citizens, and even distort American foreign policy.

And yet for the past year and half, neither Beattie nor anyone else has actually managed to prove that the plot ever existed. Like a soap bubble that vanishes with the touch of a hand, the “censorship–industrial complex” belongs to that mystical category of things that disappear when you examine them too closely.

The failure to produce evidence is not for lack of trying. During the Biden administration, MAGA allies and politicians filed multiple lawsuits with the goal of exposing alleged censorship. None has done so. One of them, brought by the Missouri attorney general, made it all the way to the Supreme Court before justices asked for underlying evidence that the government had censored anyone. The answer was no. Another, brought against the Stanford research project by America First Legal—Stephen Miller’s team—failed in July, when a judge found the suit had no standing, no jurisdiction, and, after a discovery process requested by the plaintiffs, no evidence. . . . . Other cases against the Biden administration were simply settled by President Trump’s Department of Justice without finding any evidence of “censorship” either.

Now the Trump administration’s most dedicated ideologues have also failed, spectacularly, to prove the existence of a “censorship–industrial complex” inside the State Department. After months of searching, Beattie’s successor as undersecretary for public diplomacy, Sarah Rogers, recently decided to publicize the unimpressive results of the inquiry into the Global Engagement Center. But instead of writing a report admitting that the documents that surfaced contained nothing of interest, she leaked them, selectively, to an internet troll known as DataRepublican.

“DataRepublican” is the X pseudonym of Jennica Pounds, who has a history of misreading data and connecting dots to describe nonexistent conspiracies. But the plan went wrong: Upon receipt of raw documents from Rogers, including screenshots without context, Pounds decided that Rogers was a “Deep State” operative and refused to release them. Subsequently, it emerged that Pounds herself has been secretly employed by the Pentagon, which presumably makes her a deep-state operative too. But that’s another story.

Because Pounds would not publish the documents, Rogers did so herself, . . . As she must have known, they contained no evidence of conspiracy, no proof that anyone in the Biden administration censored millions or even dozens of social-media posts. Instead, Rogers, who is theoretically responsible for promoting good relations with people in foreign countries, went after a series of U.S. citizens.

Rogers also criticized another very public, not remotely secret report, written jointly by the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, Slovakia, and the European Union, investigating “gendered disinformation,” a subject that sounds very “woke” until you realize that deepfake porn videos and orchestrated misogyny are tactics regularly used against female politicians such as Annalena Baerbock, a former German foreign minister, or Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister. The Iranian regime uses them to harass female dissidents around the world.

In the normal course of things the saga of the GEC documents would be, and should be, dismissed as a storm in a teapot. But unfortunately, the administration’s pursuit of a nonexistent censorship–industrial complex has already had real consequences for real people. In April 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was closing the Global Engagement Center because it had “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.” This was untrue, and even at the time there was no evidence for such an extraordinary statement. On the contrary, the GEC was the only institution in the U.S. government that was publicly tracking hostile international information operations, including by exposing websites in Africa or Latin America that appeared local but were in fact run by Moscow or Beijing. Rubio’s statement maligned the people who worked on these reports. Will the secretary of state now apologize to them? Compensate them? Rehire them?

The closing of the center also means that no one is now doing that work. Thanks to Rogers, Beattie, and a handful of others, the U.S. decided to blind itself to the reality that Russia, China, and Iran, with its viral animated Lego videos, all run deceptive campaigns that reach millions of people around the world. And now Americans do nothing to halt, explain, or counter them.

As if this same conspiracy theory had not done enough damage, Rogers and others at the State Department are also putting the nonexistent censorship–industrial complex at the center of American foreign policy toward Europe now too. At a conference at the Hudson Institute last spring, Rogers said that a “censorship class” had already “scuttled to Europe” to pursue a supposed vendetta against Americans from across the ocean. At the same event, Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri . . . declared that “we are witnessing a deeply troubling assault on free speech” in Europe.

These views, all of which derive from the same set of false stories, are actively shaping American policy in Europe. Late last month, the State Department put forth plans to spend $4 million to support right-wing media in Europe, including a consortium of “independent journalists” who would support the Trump administration’s view of the world.

Belatedly, even some part of the Trump administration appears to have quietly concluded that all of this has gone too far and that maybe, in fact, it would be useful for the U.S. government to understand how hostile governments seek to manipulate the internet. In May, the State Department put out a tender for software developers who could help analyze “foreign adversarial propaganda” and thus replicate the work once done by the Global Engagement Center.

As DiResta wrote this week, “they’re hiring people to do the very job they just spent 16 months claiming was a conspiracy.” So much time, energy, and money was wasted pursuing a fiction. Now more time, energy, and money will need to be spent to clean up the damage.

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Iran: The Logistics Nightmare Facing U.S. Warships

One of the hallmarks of the Felon's war of choice against Iran has been the lack of planning for an extended war being conducted on the opposite side of the world. The Felon and his sycophants believed the war would last a few days or a few weeks at most and seemingly little was considered in terms of a more extended conflict and the difficulties of supplying troops and U.S. warships in the war zone. The U.S. Navy's main supply base is in Bahrain on the west side of the Persian Gulf reachable only via the Strait of Hormuz. On the first day of the war, Iran struck back and largely destroyed the Navy's logistics base leaving the only real resupply facilities thousands of miles away.  This has created a logistics nightmare for resupply operations and has lead to issues with both food supplies and refueling for aircraft fuel and fuel for non-atomic powered vessels.  Any planning with an ounce of foresight would have contemplated this potential mess, but such seeming was not the case with the Felon and his incompetent Secretary of Defense.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the Navy's difficult situation and resupply issues that will not be going away.  Here are highlights:

On a typical U.S. aircraft carrier, 5,000 crew members work around the clock and require up to four meals a day. Although the ships are nuclear-powered, the planes and helicopters flying off them use millions of gallons of fuel each week.

Carriers don’t travel alone. They are protected by destroyers armed with antiaircraft and cruise missiles, together forming what is called a carrier strike group. Those ships also need to be resupplied with food and fuel.

There are currently two carriers and 12 destroyers in the Middle East helping to enforce a blockade of Iranian ports. . . . . The Navy has about 20 ships in the Middle East, carrying roughly 20,000 sailors and Marines. The logistical challenges are immense: The ships need enough food for more than 420,000 meals and about eight million gallons of fuel each week.

The Navy has operated there for decades and built supply depots throughout the region.

But Iran destroyed a critical Navy logistics base in Bahrain on Feb. 28, the first day of the war, and other ports in the region that can accommodate an aircraft carrier or a supply ship are also within range of Iranian missiles and drones, making them inaccessible.

Navy supply ships in the region now have to travel 2,200 miles to a tiny island in the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia to bring food, fuel and other goods to the warships in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea.

The next option is to go to Singapore, 3,700 miles away — which requires the ships to pass through the Strait of Malacca, a busy commercial corridor.

Because the war has cut off access to nearby bases in the Middle East, the only option is to undertake resupply missions at sea every five or six days. This process is potentially hazardous, exposing both the receiving ship and the supply ship to risk. During these missions, both ships need to travel together, keeping precisely the same course and speed. With waves, winds and current, it’s a challenge to keep the ships safely within about 150 feet of each other for hours.

At the same time, helicopters ferry supplies between the ships, carrying pallets of food, spare parts and mail in nets slung underneath.

The deployments for these warships are open-ended — they only go home once the president and the defense secretary decide so. However, this is not sustainable.

The Navy has only 11 aircraft carriers in total, and has sent four of them to the Middle East for the war. Some of the remaining carriers are undergoing lengthy repairs in shipyards and will not be able to deploy again for years. 

One carrier, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, spent most of its nine months at sea with no port calls. Under normal conditions, a Navy carrier would visit port about once a month to give its crew a brief rest.  On Aug. 20, the Lincoln was relieved by the U.S.S. George Washington and began making its way back home. The Lincoln was expected to make a stop on Wednesday in Thailand for a few days before continuing across the Pacific to its home base in San Diego.

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Hegseth’s Pentagon Lurches off the Rails

Living in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, one is surrounded by military bases - the Norfolk Naval Base, Joint Bases Little Creek and Fort Eustis, Oceana Airbase, Langley Air Force Base, as well as smaller operations - and literally thousands of military service members.  Things that impact the U.S. military impact both the local economy, but also the lives of friends, neighbors and their families. The result is that when there is an incompetent Secretary of Defense with discriminatory policies that favor skin color over all else and a goal of driving out competent generals and admirals there are real world consequences both locally and at the national security level.  As a piece in The Atlantic lays out Pete Hegseth is driving the U.S. military into a ditch no doubt much to the delight of America's foes in the Kremlin and Beijing. Rather than looking out for America's strategic best interests or concern about the supplies and morale of our servicemembers, Hegseth's sole concerns are (i) pleasing the mad king in the White House and (ii) ridding the Pentagon of anyone he views as disloyal and/or unwilling to parrot his lies.  Hegseth's incompetence is putting all of us and especially our servicemembers at risk.  Here are article highlights:

Making Pete Hegseth the secretary of defense was always a huge gamble. A television host with little background in national-security or defense affairs, who topped out as a major in the National Guard, he was nominated based on the same qualification shared by most of Donald Trump’s other appointees: loyalty. And now the price of that gamble is evident. The Pentagon is careening offtrack under a secretary of defense who is firing or forcing the resignations of officers and civilian officials, not because they are unqualified but because he believes they are insufficiently loyal to him, personally.

The latest casualty of Hegseth’s ongoing purge is Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who resigned today after repeatedly clashing with the secretary of defense. As my colleagues Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, and Michael Scherer report, a person familiar with Driscoll’s resignation said that he had “brought up concerns with the administration surrounding Army transformation and readiness and Hegseth’s blocking those efforts specifically by firing the Generals who were responsible.” In the careful circumlocutions of Washington-speak, that means that Driscoll went to the White House to complain about Hegseth, and the president sided with Hegseth.

Hegseth’s tenure has been disastrous on multiple scores. Instead of giving sound advice to the commander in chief and ensuring that America remains secure while the president fights a deeply unwise war of choice, he has been pursuing his political grievances about DEI and other pet peeves against the U.S. military. Hegseth seems to have a special animus toward the Army, an institution he claims “spit me out.” He fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, and he has pushed out other senior Army officers; at this point, the Army has no Senate-confirmed chief of staff or secretary.

Even in less dangerous times, Hegseth’s irresponsible behavior would be a hazard to American national security. The Defense Department is a huge bureaucracy; it requires a leader who understands more than the mechanics of teaching trainees how to do push-ups or how to handle a weapon. Secretaries of defense must grasp the economics of the defense industry, the nature of alliances, congressional politics, the policy process, and dozens of other issues for which Hegseth seems to care little and about which he knows even less.

In a time of war, however, Hegseth’s shortcomings may prove deadly. Leave aside his early stumbles, including the mishandling of sensitive information. Leave aside, even, that Hegseth dissembled about the severity of Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf that had succeeded in disrupting the logistical support for American forces in the theater and led to the kind of deprivations that were suffered by the crew of the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. Hegseth’s incompetence, and his commitment to staying in Trump’s good graces, helped launch the war itself in the first place.

Hegseth was reportedly virtually alone among senior officials in supporting Trump’s decision to attack Iran—when he should have been the one person in the room who knew better. The secretary of state and CIA director were against the idea. According to the The Wall Street Journal, even then–Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, another of Trump’s unqualified-but-sycophantic appointees, mustered the courage to give the president bad news, telling Trump that killing the reigning ayatollah and striking Iran would “likely usher in a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons”; that the Iranians “would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market”; and that Iran “would strike U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East,” all of which happened almost immediately after Trump gave the order to go to war.

Hegseth, however, supported Trump’s fantasies of a quick victory. A man of principle would have warned his president even at the risk of his job, but Pete Hegseth is not that man.

And now Hegseth has banished another enemy, Driscoll, from the Pentagon. But as the saying goes: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Hegseth, more than ever, now owns every aspect of the Pentagon’s dysfunction. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that multiple senior military leaders—those still left, that is—have warned Hegseth that the United States cannot indefinitely extend military operations against Iran.

Hegseth’s response to this story was to send his spokespeople out to castigate the press for revealing classified information. In an amateurish bungle, the Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said that the reports were “inaccurate” but also a “betrayal of the force”—leading sensible people to ask how the stories could be false and dangerous at the same time. And these were just the responses from people who are officially authorized to speak for the Pentagon; another bombshell report over the weekend revealed that the department has recruited online influencers into paid roles, but without either the influencers or the Pentagon telling anyone about their cozy arrangement with the government.

Fortunately, even under the strain of a petty and incompetent secretary, and a president mired in his delusions, senior military officers are still speaking up and telling their boss the truth about America’s parlous defense situation. One of the advantages of a large bureaucracy staffed with professionals is that much of it can run and function, at least for a while, under even the most inept leaders.

But Hegseth is apparently close to getting the Pentagon he wants: Much like his boss at the White House, Hegseth seems to desire a building full of loyalists who put the boss’s personal fortunes over the national interest. Some reports indicate, for example, that Hegseth wants to replace Driscoll with Parnell—who has no significant qualifications for the post beyond his time fighting with the press on the secretary’s behalf.

The result of all this is that the United States is losing a war to a third-rate power in the Middle East. The Russians, meanwhile, are continuing their rampage in Europe and apparently considering things so perilous that the CIA director had to fly to Moscow just to warn the Kremlin off of whatever it was thinking of doing. The Chinese are watching as Trump and Hegseth have stripped the Pacific theater of its only American aircraft carrier. In the midst of this chaos, Hegseth does chin-ups while he ponders calling all of America’s admirals and generals back to another mass meeting so he can again carp at them about fat soldiers and bearded sailors.

Pete Hegseth has failed in every mission except one: keeping his job. But firing or forcing out everyone else in the Pentagon will not make Pete Hegseth into the secretary of defense America and its men and women in uniform need. With each dismissal, he exposes only his own insecurities, even as he manages to stay employed—but the people and the armed forces of the United States are paying the inevitable price of his incompetence.

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