What The Hell America!

Esteemed Comrades of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs! Today we ask you to review your files for any communications you may have had with unreliable elements who are critical of our Party and our leader. If you have had contact with journalists, researchers, or other subversives, we ask you to report these interactions in full to the senior comrades responsible for the important work of ideological vigilance. Also, please indicate if you have encountered any suspicious use of the following terms …

That’s not actually how Acting Undersecretary of State Darren Beattie communicated his request for information to a small office at the State Department, but he may as well have. Beattie is one of President Donald Trump’s self-styled ideological commissars in the executive branch, and he seems to be taking to his duties with gusto.

According to the MIT Technology Review, on March 11 Beattie circulated a document among the then-staff of the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, known as R/FIMI, an office that once “tracked and countered foreign disinformation campaigns,” and has since been shut down. As the MIT Technology Review described the request, Beattie wanted all “staff emails and other records with or about a host of individuals and organizations that track or write about foreign disinformation,” as well as “all staff communications that merely reference Trump or people in his orbit, like Alex Jones, Glenn Greenwald, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In addition, it directs a search of communications for a long list of keywords, including ‘Pepe the Frog,’ ‘incel,’ ‘q-anon,’ ‘Black Lives Matter,’ ‘great replacement theory,’ ‘far-right,’ and ‘infodemic.’”

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Among the some 60 figures and organizations targeted by Beattie were the former U.S. cybersecurity official (and Trump appointee) Christopher Krebs, the entrepreneur Bill Gates, the open-source-journalism organization Bellingcat, the commentator Bill Kristol, the Stanford Internet Observatory, and my Atlantic colleague Anne Applebaum.

Beattie’s duties put R/FIMI under his purview. The office itself was the successor to the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, created during Barack Obama’s administration to counter disinformation efforts from abroad. As The Guardian noted, “The GEC had developed AI models to detect deepfakes, exposed Russian propaganda efforts targeting Latin American public opinion on the Ukraine conflict, and published reports on Russian and Chinese disinformation operations.” Republicans defunded the GEC last year—of course they did, with a record like that—and R/FIMI replaced it.

Now R/FIMI is gone as well: Secretary of State Marco Rubio closed it two weeks ago after he accused it of trying to “silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.” Rubio offered no evidence of this “censorship,” but the larger project might be more closely related to the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to stop anyone from looking too closely at foreign, especially Russian, manipulation of the American political system.

According to anonymous State Department officials in the MIT report, Beattie’s stated goal in trying to dragnet this information from his subordinates was to create “transparency,” and presumably show that these people and groups were in cahoots with American diplomats to criticize and undermine Trump and his agenda. Beattie reportedly compared his efforts to Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” project: After he took over Twitter in 2022, Musk funded a group of journalists to review the company’s earlier internal communications in order to reveal ostensible manipulation and censorship on the platform.

It’s strange that Beattie chose to emulate Musk’s “Twitter Files,” which ultimately revealed very little, but perhaps Beattie never intended to find anything of substance. (Renée DiResta, a professor at Georgetown, wrote about the “Twitter Files” for The Atlantic; she, too, was on Beattie’s list.) Instead, as one State Department official put it, Beattie seemed to be on more of a “witch hunt,” to see who at State talks to people outside of State, and to determine exactly what they’re talking about.

Such a project could serve two purposes: One is that it would help Beattie and others to build a blacklist of people who should be frozen out or even targeted by the administration as enemies. (As Kristol said to the MIT Technology Review when he found about the creation of such a list: “What would be the innocent reason for doing that?”) The other possibility is that Beattie was trying to chill any contact between his office and people or organizations who have not passed the administration’s political purity tests.

Considering how obsessed Trump’s top people are with calling everything “communism,” it’s ironic how much this whole business seems like a page from Soviet history, with Party commissars trying to identify ideological saboteurs in their midsts. Under Stalin, such contacts with unapproved persons, or even with people once trusted who had fallen under suspicion, could carry fatal consequences. Trumpism is more like the later regime under Leonid Brezhnev: Apparatchiks who ran afoul of new guidance or who might have been associated with people now out of favor could find themselves out of a job, demoted to menial work, or even prosecuted for petty infractions of the law. As Ambassador Daniel Fried, who was also on the list of people Beattie sought information about, put it to the MIT Technology Review, Beattie’s efforts reminded him of Eastern European “Communist Party minder[s] watching over the untrusted bureaucracy.”

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Beattie, like so many of Trump’s appointees, has had his own troubles. He earned a doctorate in philosophy from Duke and he taught at Duke for a year. He then landed a job as an aide and speechwriter in the first Trump White House, but left in 2018 after CNN revealed that he’d attended a conference that featured prominent white nationalists. In 2019, Beattie took a job with then-Congressman Matt Gaetz—not exactly a promotion after having a White House badge—and became a January 6 truther, arguing that FBI agents were in the crowd as provocateurs. (He also has continued to make racist and sexist comments: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” he wrote on X six months ago.)

In other words, he was an excellent Trump 2.0 appointee: Driven out and then brought back, full of ideological fervor, determined to find conspiracies and root out Deep State enemies—a profile for a true-believing commissar.

American officials have now been explicitly asked to make lists of their contacts with other Americans, for no practical, legal, or national security reason. Federal employees have also been provided a list of words and names that presumably trigger suspicions of disloyalty among their superiors, including those acting on behalf of the president himself. This should be a scandal, but instead it will likely just be filed away by many Americans—if they notice it at all—as just the clumsy zealotry of a minor official rather than yet another assault by one of Trump’s servants on American constitutional freedoms. Unfortunately, Trump’s mania for loyalty above all else almost guarantees that Beattie’s disgraceful attempt will not be the last such effort at Soviet-style political policing in the United States government.