What The Hell America!

LAST WEEK, THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES held its fifth hearing about a lie.

I was called as the sole minority witness in the latest installment of this particular right-wing fever dream, what the Republican majority on a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee called the “Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department.” Based on that title, you might think the hearing would investigate the cases of foreign students who have recently been arrested and had their visas revoked because they deigned to use their rights to free expression. But no, the Republicans weren’t there to talk about the ongoing assault on our Constitution. Instead, they wanted to talk about made-up stuff.

For the past four years, the Republican party has engaged in obsessive mythmaking about supposed collusion by Democrats, disinformation researchers, and the social media industry to suppress conservative viewpoints online. Reputable journalists have punctured holes in this narrative, showing how it is based on distortion and exaggeration. Academics, too, have looked into the question and found not a vast conspiracy aimed at censoring conservatives but a clear imbalance: right-wing users simply break social media platforms’ rules more frequently.

These hearings have no real analytical or fact-finding purpose, but House Republicans have created an entire fictional universe around them, comprising two investigations, dozens of transcribed interviews and depositions, and subpoenas for reams of documents and emails from research institutions around the country. These actions have formed the basis of frivolous lawsuits and smear campaigns of which institutions large and small have struggled to bear the burden.

If that sounds to you like modern-day McCarthyism, it’s because it is. Like McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade, Republican pursuit of the censorship lie is political theater is high on fantasy and low on facts. Still, it has had dire consequences; disinformation researchers have faced threats, harassment, and declining funding as a result.

I’ve been a direct target of this dangerous Republican projection. In 2022, I was appointed to lead the Disinformation Governance Board, an admittedly poorly named but anodyne coordination body tasked with shepherding counter-disinformation policy within the Department of Homeland Security. Within hours of the board’s public launch, partisan media, influencers, and members of Congress were calling it a “Ministry of Truth” and claiming that I would be censoring Americans’ speech. They did this entirely without evidence; as demonstrated by the board’s founding documents and my five-hour sworn deposition before the House Judiciary Committee in 2023, the board had nothing to do with censorship. Its mission was to protect civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, and the First Amendment.

The lies about me led to widespread harassment, credible death threats, and my inclusion in deepfake pornography. I have been forced to spend almost $90,000 in legal bills dealing with a frivolous civil suit, a congressional deposition, and a cyberstalker. So as I prepared for last week’s hearing, it made a lot of sense that a colleague asked me, “Why are you doing this? Shouldn’t you just keep your head down?” Though I wasn’t being compelled to appear, I didn’t feel like I had a choice; it was an opportunity to directly challenge the folks who have used a conspiracy theory to decimate our nation’s response to foreign disinformation. More importantly, it was a chance to directly channel the anger and frustration that many Americans are feeling to a few of the people who need to hear it.

This was clear even before the hearing—starting from the moment Republicans learned I would be the Democratic witness. Republicans’ online posts dripped with condescension and sexism, branding me “Joe Biden’s short-lived disinformation czar” (instead of engaging with my actual credentials or expertise) and sharing a carefully curated lineup of witness photos—polished headshots for the Republican witnesses, and a ridiculous screenshot from a four-year-old TikTok video for me. They reduced me to a caricature rather than engaging with my record of work.

The infantilizing rhetoric continued in the hearing itself, where Rep. Bill Huizenga, the chairman of the South and Central Asia Subcommittee that hosted the hearing, introduced me without so much as a mention of my professional background or qualifications, instead calling me a “disinformation czarina” with a smirk. Meanwhile, the Republican witnesses were given fulsome introductions. The majority clearly expected the folk villain they’ve created—a zealous, woke, feminist censor—to appear. They thought they could scare or perhaps embarrass me into submission.

Instead, in both my prepared testimony and my responses to committee questions I called out the hypocrisy of the subcommittee’s Republicans for holding their first hearing on a fiction, rather than the flagrant violations of the Constitution they were allowing the Trump administration to commit. “If [the arrest of Fulbright Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk] had happened in a country in this subcommittee’s portfolio, you would issue a statement of concern,” I told them. “But it happened here. So yes, we need First Amendment protections at the State Department—but not for imagined transgressions of previous administrations. We need protections from this administration, today.”

I also challenged the Republicans’ star witness, Matt Taibbi, whose participation only underscored just how unserious the hearing was. Taibbi was a central participant in the so-called “Twitter Files,” the much-hyped journalistic flop that falsely alleged Twitter executives were colluding with government to censor disfavored content. His reporting has been widely debunked. In his barely coherent remarks before the subcommittee, Taibbi claimed that he and other bloggers “didn’t know what they were looking at” when Elon Musk first allowed them to access the documents, as if they had stumbled upon something huge, not purposely relied on outright falsehoods, innuendo, and selectively edited screenshots to drive subscriptions to their paywalled content. I told the subcommittee, “Mr. Taibbi said . . . he didn’t know what he was looking at. Well, he still doesn’t. Everything’s a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.”

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From the dais, Republicans’ shambolic embrace of authoritarianism was on full display. Rep. Keith Self decided it would be appropriate to quote Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels during a congressional hearing. (I think his intention was to compare me to Goebbels, which would be shocking regardless of the context, but he chose to do it after I repeatedly pushed back on his assumptions about my views, undermining his already-garbled line of questions.) Worse still, this wasn’t even the first time he’s done it. Back in 2010, he used a Goebbels quote to attack a political opponent, and now, in 2025, he’s doing it again to prop up a manufactured moral panic. When confronted, he didn’t retract or apologize. Instead, his office doubled down, spinning the quote as some sort of righteous critique of government censorship and unfounded attack on me. (For next time, Rep. Self: if you have to explain why you’re quoting a Nazi, perhaps don’t quote a Nazi.) Self’s Goebbels moment aired on Fox News the day after the hearing, leading me to be targeted with a fresh round of online threats and a violent voicemail.

Rep. Self wasn’t the only committee member to awkwardly grasp at a dubious historical reference during the hearing. Responding to my characterization of the hearing as a twenty-first-century McCarthy inquisition, Rep. Scott Perry mused aloud that “many people disagree with McCarthy’s methods, but you can’t disagree with the facts: that the people that he listed turned out to all be subversive Communists.” The irony was so thick you could cut it with a knife: While claiming to be concerned about free speech and backing Trump’s assault on the First Amendment, Perry was celebrating one of the most infamous abusers of American government power, and distorting history in the process.

In the days since the hearing, I’ve gotten notes of thanks from many Americans who were happy to see someone directly confronting a few of the falsehoods on which Trumpists have built their rule. Like the town halls across the country where Trump’s foot soldiers are being challenged by angry constituents for the first time, these representatives were unprepared for the indignation and expertise of someone they’ve smeared without a second thought. Wading through their hypocrisy is exhausting. And it’s risky. But if we want to slow or stop America’s slide into autocracy, we have to keep fighting for the truth. Last week’s hearing, though a spectacle based on lies, reminded me that we shouldn’t wallow in despair; when you stand up to bullies and fight, they crumble.