Many Trump supporters keep insisting that his immigration purges are justified because the people swept up in them came here “illegally,” so who cares if they get kicked out (or shipped off to some random war-torn country). When asked what people seeking asylum should do, the answer is often “do it the legal way.” That the US government has spent years making “the legal way” harder and harder — and, as we’re about to see, has now started punishing the people who actually took it — never seems to enter the conversation. But here we have a really clear example of people doing it “the legal way, as instructed by Trump himself” who are about to get kicked out of the US.
The AP is reporting that the administration is about to pull out on the order of 200,000 visas from those who came to the US legally under B1 or B2 visas, and then sought asylum, just as Trump said they should. This would be the largest mass revocation of visas in US history.
The Trump administration is preparing to revoke the business and tourism visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are currently seeking asylum status in the United States. If it happens, the move would be the largest single mass revocation of visas in U.S. history and would likely face legal challenges.
Unless challengedor revised, the State Department is expected to announce in the coming weeks the revocation of so-called B1 and B2 visas issued between 2016 and 2026 whose holders havesought asylumor are now seeking asylum, according to State Department documents obtained by The Associated Press and two U.S. officials. The action will be taken in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security.
“We are coordinating with DHS to identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently,” said State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott.
Under this plan, the illegal aliens will no longer get a free pass into our country by lodging meritless claims in seeking asylum. Instead, migrants seeking asylum will have to present themselves lawfully at a port of entry. So they’re going to have to lawfully present themselves at a port of entry.
“I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally,” he declared…
Note that these are two separate demands: show up at a port of entry rather than sneaking across, and get into the country through legal channels in the first place. The people about to lose their visas satisfied both, and then some. They applied for a visa, got vetted and approved by the State Department, walked in through the front door, and filed an asylum claim through the official process. If there’s a more “legal way” available, nobody has described it.
That demand, that people come “legally” and then make their asylum claims at a port of entry (though the courts later deemed this “asylum only counts at port of entry” to be wildly against the law) still resulted in a ton of people getting legal visas to the US, and then seeking asylum when they entered.
It now appears that (unsurprisingly) the Trump administration was full of shit when they claimed they wanted asylum seekers to “come the legal way.”
There was nothing in what Trump said initially that said they had to get other types of visas to seek asylum. It just said “get here legally and then make your case.” Which is exactly what all of these people did, and Trump and Marco Rubio are about to pull their visas, even though they literally did things “the legal way” that Trump himself had encouraged.
While this won’t necessarily mean immediate deportations, it will likely mean that people with live, pending asylum claims lose their lawful status while those claims are still being adjudicated — which is precisely how you end up removable. And with bands of roving ICE thugs looking for anyone without legal status to deport, you know these people are likely to be added to the target list.
So once again, doing things “the legal way” turns out to protect you from exactly nothing. Follow the instructions the president himself gave you and on the visa the State Department itself issued you, file the paperwork the process demands, and the reward is having that visa pulled while your claim is still pending. What good is doing things “the legal way” when, with the stroke of a pen, Trump and Rubio will make that “legal way” illegal?
The New Colossus poem on the Statue of Liberty reads:
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…
To which the Trump administration responds: “get the fuck out of here.”
So when the whole narrative of the “censorship industrial complex” came about, you’d think that I would have been on board, having called out years of efforts by politicians to pressure companies into removing certain speech along with a moral panic about “disinformation.”
But, reality matters. And that’s why, when stories started popping up about a vast collaboration between tech companies and governments to “censor” people based on ideological viewpoints, I looked at the details — and it was basically all bullshit.
The reality is that there are efforts at spreading disinformation and propaganda. And while I’m skeptical about how powerful or successful those can be… ironically, the one example that has caused me to reconsider my position is the success of the blatant lie about the “censorship industrial complex.”
Type Investigations and the MIT Tech Review teamed up to put together a deeply researched article highlighting how a group of bullshit peddling right-wing influencers basically invented the entire concept of the “censorship industrial complex” and were able to mainstream it across the right-wing mediasphere, deep into the Trump White House, and are likely a big part of the reason Elon Musk focused on killing USAID in his early days at DOGE. It’s quite a report. The key thing, though, is that a bunch of motivated propagandists took any effort at making internet websites safer… and insisted that they were about censorship. And then they would put together conspiracy cork boards insisting that these efforts were really controlled by the government.
The second Trump administration’s war on censorship has contributed to the dismantling of numerous government agencies, like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), among others. It’s razed the infrastructure that tracks and counters attempts by foreign powers to influence elections and popular opinion. It has also been used to justify sweeping travel bans and sanctions on targeted individuals and entire industries. It’s provoked tensions with the European Union over its tech regulations, which these critics say silence Americans. And it’s even reshaped US national security strategy.
Its reach, though, isn’t limited to US bureaucracy, academia, or civil society groups. The weaponization of ideas about censorship also affects the billions of people globally who get information, or interact with each other, online—which is to say, just about everyone.
At the center of it all is a dude named Mike Benz, who was outed as a racist internet troll who spent years pushing the “great replacement theory” and screaming about “white genocide,” who reinvented himself from a low level Trump staffer in Housing and Urban Development into a self-styled “cyber expert” in the State Department who claimed he had inside knowledge on the whole “censorship industrial complex.” The reality is that Benz worked in the State Department for just a few months after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and already had a history of insisting that basic trust & safety work — including fact checking, let alone limiting or banning someone for violating a site’s terms of service — was “censorship.”
At the center of this effort is Mike Benz, Rubio’s interview partner last April. Benz served a brief stint in Donald Trump’s first administration but has largely remained unknown, even as some of his ideas—including the conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift was a NATO asset and the pro-white-identity content he published anonymously before he joined the government—have gained followers. Our analysis uncovers just how integral he in particular was to spreading the CIC theory: We found him to be the most prolific creator of related content online, which was in turn picked up by right-wing media outlets and podcasts and eventually reached the highest echelons of power in the US. His work prompted congressional—and eventually presidential—action and generated both attention and financial benefits for Benz personally. (Benz did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Last April, near the end of the interview at the State Department, Rubio shot Benz a friendly finger gun.
“Thanks for your attention to this topic,” Rubio said. “I know you’ve been on this a long time.”
Benz spent much of the Biden administration trying to convince everyone of this vast censorship industrial complex. Notably, just days before this Type Investigations piece came out, Renee DiResta (who Benz and others falsely insist was a key player in this mythical censorship industrial complex) published a recording and transcript of the Twitter Spaces where a very credulous Matt Taibbi fell for Benz’s bullshit, leading to years of Taibbi spewing complete nonsense about the so-called “Twitter Files.”
Benz did not mention that he was appointed to this portfolio in November 2020. The Trump administration ended on January 20, 2021. His State Department tenure lasted roughly two months…over the holidays.
Taibbi bit immediately. He told Benz he’d sent him a DM, adding: “I’m very anxious to talk to you in a longer setting if that’s possible.” Benz, he said, “could probably be invaluable” to a huge project he was launching to map the same world.
Benz continued listing his bona fides: there was no close second with his knowledge, he said. He had delivered “eight or nine congressional briefings,” spoken with “four or five senators,” and briefed House and Senate committees. If Taibbi would talk to him privately, Benz said, he could describe “every single individual, institution, the chronology, the pretexts that were used, all of the dirty little tricks that were done each step of the way.”
“I can tell you literally everything,” he said.
“That’s great,” Taibbi replied.
As this new report points out, once Benz reached Taibbi (and via him, Michael Shellenberger), combined with Rep. Jim Jordan, you had a closed loop of utter bullshit, with each of them egging the others into deeper conspiracy theories on a foundation of confirmation bias and not bothering to check.
In a 2023 podcast interview, Shellenberger credited Benz with opening his eyes to the full extent to which conservative voices were being silenced. “We basically went from being concerned about bad forms of censorship by Twitter and other social media platforms to being concerned about government censorship,” Shellenberger said.
“We were, like, proverbially touching the elephant. We didn’t understand what the elephant was [until] we discovered your work, Mike.”
And it’s one thing if the damage to this were just about disinformation research. All that effort absolutely kneecapped the ability of the US to deal with foreign misinformation (and it’s mildly amusing watching MAGA folks now freaking out about how the US is so bad at responding to foreign influence campaigns, when they’re the reason that we destroyed our capacity). But as the Type Investigations article shows, the machinery Benz had spent two years building was also a big part of why Elon Musk shut down USAID, likely leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Benz deserves some of the credit for that apparently:
The agency had been a longtime obsession for Benz, who argued that it was an instrument of censorship as early as FFO’s first report in July 2022. An effort in Brazil to limit the spread of disinformation on messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, FFO alleged, was a form of censorship financed by USAID and others. Later that year, Benz also accused USAID of funding what he called a “Countering Disinformation Guidebook for Digital Censorship.” In reality, it was a USAID primer for its overseas staff on how to recognize disinformation campaigns in the foreign countries where the agency operated.
Our analysis shows that Benz and FFO were the dominant voices promoting conspiracy theories around USAID and censorship from 2022 until late 2024, when Benz talked about it on Rogan’s podcast. “USAID is effectively a ‘switch player’ to assist the Pentagon on the national security front, to assist the State Department on the national interest front, or to assist the intelligence community on a sort of clandestine operation front,” Benz alleged.
His appearance drew millions of viewers, including Musk. The trillionaire retweeted an X user’s glowing summary of the interview. “Mike Benz just revealed everything,” the user wrote, including “how ‘democracy’ was redefined to silence you.”
This marked the first time Musk, newly installed at DOGE, had posted specifically about USAID. But Benz and Musk were already acquainted. The two had exchanged tweets and threads about censorship and other conspiracy theories for years.
Oh, and it should be mentioned that Marco Rubio hired Benz to spend his time sorting through what’s left of USAID to try to justify his bullshit claims, just as Musk had Taibbi and Shellenberger sniff through Twitter’s internal docs in the hopes that they would craft a narrative to support his prejudices.
The incredible bit to me here is that in both the Twitter Files nonsense and with the US government, Musk was always in a position where he could look at the source documents and details himself. He could speak to actual experts. Instead, he took the kook conspiracy theories from nonsense peddlers, assumed they were true because they fed into what he wanted to believe, and ran with them — with every bit of available evidence saying he was just swallowing propaganda.
The article also details the plumbing: how a small, heavily interconnected — and largely commonly funded — slice of the right-wing media ecosystem pumped these ideas back and forth until they looked like consensus:
In each case, our analysis found, CIC-related conspiracy theories on social media were supported by a number of conservative groups; key among them were FFO and AFL, which played a crucial role in obtaining government records they claimed showed evidence that conservatives were censored. FFO then used these documents to write exhaustive reports supposedly connecting the dots to explain how the censorship industry worked. AFL also instigated a number of lawsuits against supposedly CIC-implicated individuals and organizations.
These materials were then amplified by a slew of right-wing media outlets, many with shared funding.
Much of that financing was funneled through the Informing America Foundation (IAF), a media-oriented grant-making organization that John Solomon helped to launch after leaving his position at The Hill back in 2019, following public scrutiny of columns about the Bidens and Ukraine. IAF funds a network of podcasts called Real America’s Voice, which includes shows run by key Trump allies like Steve Bannon, Jack Prosobiec, and the late Charlie Kirk, as well as Solomon himself. It also finances a network of what media scholars call “pink slime” websites, which are designed to look like nonpartisan local news but have a partisan slant. Benz appeared regularly on these podcasts and in these outlets, further embedding the CIC narrative in the right-wing information ecosystem—while simultaneously enhancing his own profile and revenue streams on X Premium and other platforms.
As the article also notes, all of these jackasses pushing nonsense about a non-existent censorship industrial complex have basically all been either entirely silent or — worse — have effectively cheered on examples of the Trump administration actively censoring speech of critics. But, as free speech expert David Kaye mentions in that article, it seems like the claims about the censorship industrial complex is all fluff and nonsense to distract from the very real censorship of the Trump administration:
That’s why it’s important to look beyond the political narratives themselves and consider actions, says David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a former UN special rapporteur for free speech. “The administration probably realizes that … Americans do not generally feel censored by Europe or Brazil,” he says. But by focusing on Europe, Brazil, and the broader CIC idea, it hopes to “distract” from the fact that “Americans are definitely facing the most substantial censorship in, I don’t know, 100 years,” he adds—though “it’s actually the Trump administration” that is responsible.
The notion of a censorship-industrial complex is proving again and again to be a convenient and powerful pretext for silencing the loudest critics of those in power. “The very thing that they are accusing people of—censoring—is something that they’re now perpetuating,” says Jankowicz.
And as the article points out, Benz is 100% on board with using the government to stifle speech. Just so long as it’s the speech of his ideological foes.
That, of course, may have been the goal all along. From the stage of the Heritage Foundation back in 2024, Benz spoke of the CIC as having its hand on a “God button” giving it the power to “control discourse on every political issue.” Now conservatives can wield that power themselves.
“Democracy is about the hearts and minds of the people,” he told the audience. “If you can simply shut off the ability to influence hearts and minds through censorship, you win by default.”
There’s much more in the article (also available at MIT Tech Review), and you should read it — not because you need convincing that Mike Benz is full of shit, but because bits of this conspiracy theory have leaked well outside of MAGA world. I still regularly run into perfectly reasonable non-MAGA people who believe some version of “the Biden administration worked with social media to silence conservatives.” It didn’t. But the story was told loudly enough, for long enough, by enough people who had a financial and/or political interest in telling it, that it became accepted wisdom among many.
And look at where it landed. The State Department shut down the office that tracked foreign influence operations, and Rubio announced it in a friendly video chat with the guy who spent a decade inventing the reason to shut it down. Rubio then banned five Europeans from entering the United States for the crime of advocating for content moderation rules he doesn’t like — calling them “agents of the censorship-industrial complex” — until a judge blocked it as “likely viewpoint discriminatory.” The State Department launched a website, freedom.gov, whose entire purpose is to relitigate other countries’ moderation decisions. And, of course, you have the Trump FCC chair going after broadcasters for airing jokes about the president and for platforming Democratic candidates.
Every one of those is actual censorship. Every one is the government using state power to punish speech it dislikes. None of those are a trust & safety team enforcing violations of its terms of service on its own private property.
So it was a disinformation campaign so successful that it kneecapped our ability to fight disinformation campaigns. That would be bad enough on its own. But the more lasting damage is that the censorship-industrial complex Benz spent a decade describing didn’t exist when he started describing it. But it exists now, and it’s controlled by Marco Rubio, Elon Musk… and Mike Benz.
Some intelligence analysts have declined to brief on antifa at interagency meetings because they do not regard it as a serious counterterrorism threat.
As a terrorism scholar who spent a decade running the State Department office that designates terrorist organizations, I understand their confusion. The threat the administration describes does not exist in the form the administration describes it.
There is no membership roll, no command hierarchy and no funding structure. There is no leader of antifa – the Trump administration has not named one – and there is no record of deadly attacks attributed to a U.S.-based organization called antifa.
Groups like the Islamic State group and al-Qaida have killed tens of thousands of people and have a documented chain of command. Antifa does not. You cannot decapitate a movement with no head, and you cannot sanction an organization that does not exist.
As such, the Trump administration created one.
Trump administration targets antifa
The construction project began on Sept. 22, 2025, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. The order describes antifa as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government.” It directs every relevant agency to investigate and dismantle its operations.
Two problems are immediately apparent. First, no legal authority exists to designate domestic organizations as terrorist groups. It’s a gap that Congress has deliberately preserved for First Amendment reasons.
Second, the order designates as an organization something the FBI’s past leadership has described as an ideology. Trump’s executive order asserts an antifa enterprise into existence and then declares war on it.
Three days after the executive order, the White House implemented the order through National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which converts the fiction into machinery. The memorandum directs the Treasury Department to identify and disrupt financial networks that fund what it deems domestic terrorism. The memorandum instructs banks to file suspicious activity reports with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the U.S. government’s financial intelligence unit.
That means the government’s financial surveillance apparatus, built to trace al-Qaida’s money in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is being pointed at Americans that the administration considers left-wing.
The memorandum likewise directs the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute and disrupt entities and individuals. That harnesses a network of roughly 200 task forces comprising over 4,000 personnel from federal, state and local agencies.
The wording of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 gives away the administration’s true intent. It identifies the markers of this supposed terrorist movement as anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity. It criticizes the movement for its hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.
Those are not indicators of terrorism. They are political positions.
State Department targets groups overseas
The foreign component of the campaign arrived in November 2025. That’s when the State Department designated four European groups – one each from Germany and Italy and two from Greece – as Specially Designated Global Terrorists and Foreign Terrorist Organizations pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The State Department-designated groups are real. And some of their members have committed genuine crimes, including assaults and small-scale bombings.
But as I have noted, the designations are very peculiar. These groups have committed vandalism and harmed people, but not one of the four has carried out an attack that led to any fatalities.
German leaders have said the threat from one of the designated groups, Antifa Ost, or Antifa East, had recently decreased significantly.
As the former head of the State Department’s office that recommended to the secretary of state which groups to designate, I’ve been involved in the designations of hundreds of individuals and organizations. The bar was never this low. That’s because the Foreign Terrorist Organization list loses its meaning, and its deterrent power, when it includes groups whose body count is zero while genuinely lethal movements go unlisted.
The foreign nexus
That brings us back to the State Department’s ministerial. The sequence of events leading up to it matter:
Invent the organization by executive order; build the enforcement machinery by presidential memorandum; manufacture the foreign nexus through the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designations; and then convene the world to ratify the story. Each step launders the previous one.
Behind it all, Trump administration officials have discussed using the foreign terrorism labels to justify going after Americans with links to the movement. That is the point of the exercise, and U.S allies like the Netherlands have explained how antifa could not be designated as a terrorist group under their laws.
Counterterrorism tools are among the most powerful instruments the U.S. government possesses. I don’t believe that using them against an ideology, one defined by opposition to fascism, makes America safer. I believe it tells every ally the U.S. asks for help that the world’s leading counterterrorism power can no longer tell the difference between a threat and an opponent.
Implications of the ministerial meeting
This is not just an issue of semantics and rhetoric – each action by the Trump administration against a strawman enemy creates risks. And the push to internationalize the antifa threat could have dire consequences at home.
First, if the State Department leaves the July 16 meeting with pliable allies willing to brand antifa a terrorist organization, it will embolden the administration to point to a supposed global conspiracy of the far left.
That path leads to a State Department foreign terrorist designation. Such a designation means Americans could have their bank accounts frozen and quite possibly find themselves rounded up for providing material support to a movement rather than an organization. This would be more dangerous than Trump’s earlier executive order.
Second, it could chill freedom of speech and assembly. Once other governments treat antifa as a terrorist entity, the U.S. government gains cover to shut down protests under the guise of exposing global left-wing plotting.
Third, it could justify the revival of projects like the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, resurrecting the surveillance, infiltration and disruption of lawful political activity that the bureau was supposed to have abandoned after the abuses of the 1970s.
Fourth, as one European counterterrorism scholar recently warned, the summit lays bare a widening split between American and European counterterrorism priorities and the Trump administration’s willingness to bend counterterrorism policy to partisan ends.
That divergence is the real hazard, far more than any phantom left-wing terrorism group, because European counterterrorism leans so heavily on U.S. intelligence. As such, transatlantic counterterrorism cooperation could be in for turbulent times.
Whatever the outcome of the ministerial meeting, there is no version that will make Americans safer.
I believe one result is certain: Genuine threats – from groups with leaders, actual funding and malicious intent – will get less attention from the U.S. and any ally co-opted to take action against antifa.
Jason M. Blazakis is Professor of Practice and Director of Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at Middlebury College
A little-noticed presidential national security directive is now the legal engine behind a wave of terrorism prosecutions against left-wing protesters.
That domestic campaign now has an international dimension, one that American officials had been planning for months, culminating on July 16, 2026, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism drew representatives from more than 65 countries to Washington. The gathering was informally called the “Antifa summit.”
Rubio described antifa-aligned networks as sharing infrastructure across borders and accused Iran and Cuba of helping bankroll the movement, without offering evidence. The White House declared the summit the start of an “unprecedented global offensive” against what it calls “radical left terrorism.”
This offensive is built on the same domestic legal architecture that has now sent American activists to prison for decades.
That architecture is National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, issued on Sept. 25, 2025, which for the first time appeared to authorize preemptive law enforcement measures against Americans based not on whether they are planning to commit violence but for their political or ideological beliefs.
Nearly a year later, that blueprint has moved from paper into practice.
The Justice Department has built task forces staffed by counterterrorism prosecutors. The FBI has set up its own NSPM-7 mission center to oversee investigations into left-wing movements, including a joint effort with the IRS to investigate nonprofit groups.
The Justice Department has used this machinery to convict activists and send some of them to prison for decades.
NSPM-7 was not passed by Congress. It’s a lesser-known tool of executive power: a presidential memorandum.
This structure allows the president to direct law enforcement and national security agencies, with little opportunity for congressional oversight.
Presidential national security powers
Executive memorandums direct agencies to prepare reports, implement policies or align programs with the administration’s priorities. Unlike executive orders, they aren’t required to be published. When they relate to national security, like NSPM-7, they’re called national security directives – many of which stay classified and may not be declassified for years or decades.
The stated purpose of NSPM-7 is to counter domestic terrorism and organized political violence, focusing mainly on perceived threats from the political left. The memorandum identifies “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalism” or “anti-American” views as potential indicators that a group or person will commit domestic terrorism.
The memorandum claims that political violence originates with “anti-fascist” groups that hold the following views: “support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
The strategy includes preemptive measures to disrupt groups before they engage in violent political acts, empowering multiagency task forces to investigate potential federal crimes related to radicalization and the groups’ funders. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 2025 implementation memo went further, ordering a five-year review of agency files on antifa. A task force staffed with counterterrorism and organized-crime prosecutors is carrying out these investigations.
‘Domestic terrorist organizations’
The memorandum directs the Department of Justice to focus FBI resources from approximately 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces on investigating “acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons” for the purpose of “political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights; and the violent deprivation of any citizen’s rights.”
NSPM-7 also allows the attorney general to propose groups for designation as “domestic terrorist organizations.” That includes groups that engage in “organized doxxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.”
Existing laws allow the secretary of state to designate groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” that are then subject to financial sanctions.
That gap hasn’t stopped prosecutions. In Texas, eight defendants tied to a “North Texas Antifa Cell” were sentenced in June 2026 for a 2025 armed confrontation at the Prairieland immigration detention center. One man received 100 years, and others who never fired a weapon still drew decades in prison under terrorism sentencing guidelines.
In Minnesota, 15 members and associates of a group called Direct Action Minnesota were indicted in June 2026 on conspiracy and assault charges. A 94-page indictment cited behavior such as wearing an “I’m Antifa!” sweatshirt, possessing a bullhorn or including a devil emoji in a Signal message.
Defining terrorism
NSPM-7 marks a major conceptual shift in U.S. counterterrorism policy, departing from approaches that primarily targeted foreign threats.
After 9/11, the Bush administration fused counterterrorism with national defense through the global war on terrorism. The Obama administration later tried to narrow those powers, asking whether targeted individuals “pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons” — a standard focused on tactics and capture feasibility, not ideology.
The first Trump administration used a “travel ban” against several “terror-prone” countries, while President Joe Biden redirected focus toward weapons of mass destruction.
Notably, the “domestic terrorist” label itself has rarely produced actual charges. The State Department designated four antifa-aligned groups as foreign terrorist organizations. But antifa is a decentralized movement, not a formal group with a roster.
Prosecutors have instead leaned on older statutes such as material support for terrorism and conspiracy laws, tools originally built for cases like the ones above, not protest movements.
First Amendment rights at risk
There is no single official definition of terrorism in U.S. law; definitions vary by purpose – criminal law, intelligence collection, civil liability.
Definitions in all those areas typically focus on identifying violent or dangerous acts done with the intent to intimidate or coerce civilians or influence government policy.
But more than redefining terrorism, NSPM-7 reorients the machinery of national security toward the policing of belief.
The First Amendment generally prevents the government from punishing people for unpopular opinions. It also protects the ability for people to associate to advance public and private ideas in pursuit of political, economic, religious or cultural goals.
The directive’s emphasis on ideological orientations – “anti-Christianity,” “anti-capitalism” and “anti-American” views – as indicators of domestic terrorism potentially jeopardizes First Amendment rights.
Thirty-one members of Congress sent a letter to Trump in October 2025 expressing “serious concerns” about NSPM-7, warning that it poses “serious constitutional, statutory and civil liberties risks, especially if used to target political dissent, protest or ideological speech.”
As the ACLU warns, any definition of terrorism that includes ideological components risks criminalizing people or groups based on belief rather than based on violence or other criminal conduct.
Congress has declined to create a domestic complement to the foreign terrorist designation in large part because of the potential for impinging on First Amendment–protected association and speech.
But I fear that chilling speech may be the point.
Silencing dissent
NSPM-7 does not criminalize previously legal conduct.
Law professor Steve Vladeck frames this chill as “obeying in advance,” in which organizations self-censor rather than risk investigation, prosecution or defending against the “domestic terrorist” label. Federal judges in the Prairieland case have shown little sympathy for that distinction: One judge described the protest itself as “an assault on democracy,” even for defendants who never touched a weapon.
Although left-wing violence has risen in the past decade, empirical evidence shows it remains far below historical levels of right-wing or jihadist violence.
Most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, accounting for the vast majority of domestic terrorism fatalities.
Yet NSPM-7 focuses disproportionately on left-wing ideologies. NSPM-7 departs from prior U.S. counterterrorism frameworks by prioritizing the suppression of ideologically motivated dissent, even where, as in Minnesota, judges have already dismissed roughly half of similar federal cases for lack of evidence.
Melinda Haas is Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh
Frank Ssekamwa says the United States presented his country with an impossible choice. If it accepted the terms of a new health agreement, Uganda would have to give the U.S. access to the data of millions of his fellow citizens — a decision he worries would make their personal information more vulnerable to breaches and possible exploitation.
But if it refused, the East African nation would likely lose out on more than a billion dollars to address HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and other illnesses, even as its people face ongoing threats from Ebola and other deadly infectious diseases.
So, on Dec. 10, it agreed.
“If you take the deal, you’re going to be exploited. If you don’t take it, you’re going to die,” said Ssekamwa, an attorney and digital rights expert in Uganda. “It’s the essence of digital colonialism.”
Across Africa, countries have faced similar dilemmas as the U.S. has held a series of closed-door negotiations in which lifesaving aid has been conditioned on access to citizens’ health data. The negotiations come in the wake of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which — in contrast with the new contracts — provided billions of dollars in aid with few strings attached. Officials in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ghana have been so outraged by the demands that they rejected the initial deals.
The demand to access health data is central to the Trump administration’s new America First Global Health Strategy, an openly transactional approach that seeks to leverage the desperate need for medical treatments abroad. Aid will now be given “in a way that directly benefits the American people and directly promotes our national interest,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in September.
The State Department declined to publicly release global aid and data-sharing agreements it has signed with more than 30 countries as part of its new approach. But a ProPublica analysis of nine of the deals offers a window into the extensive U.S. demands for access to data — and the potential risks and vulnerabilities for the citizens of countries that have signed them. ProPublica also reviewed a data-sharing agreement struck with Uganda, which has not previously been reported; a data agreement with Kenya; six agreements over the sharing of pathogens that can cause pandemics that were made public by the State Department this week; generic templates of deals for sharing both data and pathogens that can cause pandemics; and an analysis of the documents the advocacy group Public Citizen shared exclusively with ProPublica.
ProPublica also consulted more than a dozen experts in data privacy and global health, including several with direct knowledge of U.S. policy who said that the insistent demands for data access and other resources as a condition of aid are unprecedented. Without seeing the full suite of agreements, they could not identify all vulnerabilities. But they spotted some red flags: The terms of the deals are vague and lack language standard in most data-sharing agreements that adequately limits what data is collected and how it can be used. That increases the risk that individuals’ personal data could be exposed, misused or commercialized without their consent.
In the Ugandan data deal, the U.S. will get direct, real-time access to nine of the nation’s health data systems for seven years, including the central repository that stores all of its health information, lab data, data collected by community health workers and, critically, its system for managing individuals’ electronic medical records.The agreement calls for the sharing of aggregated data with all personally identifiable information removed. It also says the data should be used for delivering and auditing healthcare services.
But lawyers and digital privacy experts argue that the deal raises questions about who will have access to the massive cache of health data and whether it could be inappropriately accessed and exploited.
Some expressed concern that, because it is possible to reverse-engineer data that has been anonymized, people with HIV, tuberculosis and other diseases could have their records exposed.
Stephanie Psaki, who served as the U.S. coordinator for global health security under President Joe Biden, described the Trump administration’s approach as a “blunt instrument of ‘just give me the login to your data systems.’”
“The U.S. would never agree to that,” she said, if the deal were offered in reverse.
In Uganda, the U.S. will provide up to $1.7 billion over five years for global health security and the treatment and prevention of deadly conditions such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and polio.In the past, the U.S. gave this aid without asking for direct benefits in return, saving an estimated 170,000 Ugandan lives per year.
While a significant investment, it is less than the U.S. previously spent in Uganda and will decrease every year of the agreement. By 2030, the African nation will receive 45% less global health funding than when Trump retook office, according to an analysis by Vincent Lin of Partners in Health, which provides healthcare in poor countries.
Several experts said there is broad support for some of the goals of the new plan for aid, including reducing African countries’ dependence on the U.S. for healthcare needs. But they worry the transactional nature of the approach could backfire by undermining trust or, in some cases, driving nations to reject deals altogether.
After withdrawing from the World Health Organization and losing access to its global network that tracks and combats disease outbreaks, the U.S. is attempting to obtain the information necessary to address potential pandemics through a patchwork of deals with individual countries. Each of the agreements ProPublica reviewed includes a section on responding to outbreaks. And some countries have signed separate pathogen-sharing agreements, which state that countries must “initiate sharing specimen(s) and related data” within five days of a U.S. request. The Trump administration is also planning unprecedented involvement of private companies to manage and process data.
The State Department told ProPublica that it needs access to the data to improve health outcomes in recipient countries and keep Americans safe. The new approach also requires countries to invest more in their own health systems in exchange for the aid, a promise many countries will likely struggle to fulfill. And, in some cases, including the deal with Uganda, it aims to boost local manufacturing through partnerships with American companies.
The State Department said it took multiple factors into account to ensure the required investments from other countries were “realistic and achievable.”
“The United States is investing billions of dollars in other countries’ health systems to fight infectious disease. In return, we expect governments to increase their own spending on health, so programs are sustainable and under genuine national ownership, not permanently financed by U.S. taxpayers. For the first time, both sides are putting skin in the game to ensure lasting impact,” a State Department spokesperson said in response to questions about the agreements.
In response to follow-up questions from ProPublica, spokesperson Tommy Pigott said the agreements “share only the same kinds of aggregated, de-identified data that has been shared and used for years in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. All data sharing is consistent with each country’s laws and approvals. No personally identifiable information is being received or shared by the United States government.”
Uganda’s Ministry of Health, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Personal Data Protection Office and embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to questions for this article.
In the age of artificial intelligence, large health data sets have become so valuable they’ve been referred to as the new gold. The precise value of the health data of an entire nation is unclear, but it could be extremely valuable to AI-driven companies for training models.The industry of buying and selling such information troves is worth billions. And countries around the world have come to regard their citizens’ health records as national assets that deserve special protections and can confer economic and strategic advantages.
Yet the agreements, which are part of a strategy the State Department openly states is intended to make America “more prosperous” and “promote American health innovations,” provide no guarantee that Africans subject to them will have a say in what happens with their data or receive a fair share of its benefits. “Once companies get this data, the value is being accrued. But there’s no way for the [African] population to know how companies will use it,” said Jane Munga of the Carnegie Endowment for Intenational Peace, who has argued that the agreements may violate African privacy laws.
Africans have also expressed concern that they will not be able to access and benefit from medicines and vaccines developed from pathogen samples shared with the U.S. Five of the six specimen-sharing agreements reviewed by ProPublica state that, in the event that a medical product is developed primarily from a specimen from the country, the U.S. government “shall prioritize” a request from that government behind the needs of the U.S. Only one of the agreements, with Nigeria, commits the U.S. to facilitating “priority access” to — and the donation of — any medical products developed using the specimens.
The phenomenon of extracting information and samples from less-resourced populations and failing to credit and compensate them for their contributions to medical developments is well known enough to have several names, including “parachute science.” Just a few years ago, countries, including some in Africa, hosted COVID-19 vaccine trials, only to later struggle to access the shots they helped to develop.
Each agreement includes “benefit-sharing provisions,” the State Department said in response to questions.
After the Trump administration dismantled USAID, the world’s largest provider of humanitarian assistance, it also drastically reduced funding for international health work done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and severely scaled back the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which combats HIV globally. In addition to withdrawing from the WHO, the U.S. removed itself from international negotiations over a pandemic agreement intended to affirm countries’ sovereign rights to their biological resources and ensure equitable access to medical interventions.
Brad Smith, an entrepreneur who served in the first Trump administration, is now in charge of creating the system that would rise from the ashes. Before joining this administration, Smith founded three companies with business models that rest in part on using data to reduce healthcare costs, including CareBridge, a home care provider that sold for a reported $2.7 billion in 2024. During the presidential transition that year, Smith led the government efficiency panel that would become Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. After Trump took office, he presided over some $67 billion in sweeping cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services before being brought on as an adviser to the State Department.
Although the humanitarian aid system had been largely dismantled, Congress required the executive branch to continue providing aid. So Smith and his team had to find new ways to get the funding to countries, ensure that it was being spent wisely and address potential pandemics — all without most of the international partners and staff the government had previously relied on to carry out this complex work.
A Rhodes scholar known for his intense work ethic, Smith threw himself into the effort. State Department staff fielded calls from him at all hours of the night to explain budget items on spreadsheets. Through his personal lawyer, Smith referred questions to the State Department.
One of the greatest challenges lay in the handling of health data. In the past, PEPFAR, the HIV program, built its own systems to handle anonymized data, separate from government health records — a setup that Trump administration officials and others have criticized as inefficient.
The America First plan proposed standardizing data collection and processing within countries. The Ugandan data agreement requires the country to provide the U.S. — and its contractors — with logins “or other secure access mechanisms” to directly enter the country’s data systems. The new approach, U.S. officials say, will enable the U.S. to continue auditing programs and track outbreaks.
The agreements ProPublica reviewed include statements about the U.S. government’s intent to ensure data security and say that the data is being accessed for the purposes of addressing diseases and auditing that work, but they leave open the possibility that sensitive information could be revealed, according to the data privacy experts ProPublica consulted.
At particular risk are countries that don’t have national data privacy laws, such as Liberia, whose memorandum of understanding requires “interlinked and interoperable” data systems for “surveillance, laboratory, response, health, environment, agriculture.” That country’s main health agreement doesn’t require the U.S. to limit the amount of data it takes to the least needed, a standard clause in U.S. contracts, according to Abdoul Jalil Djiberou Mahamadou, a recent postdoctoral fellow focusing on bioethics at Stanford University. (Neither Liberia nor the State Department has released the supplemental data-sharing agreement.) “Once data is breached, it’s nearly impossible to get it back,” Mahamadou added.
The Liberian government did not respond to a request for comment.
The Ugandan data-sharing agreement says it will comply with the laws of both nations and permits the sharing of “sensitive personal data” if the consent of individuals whose data is shared is obtained, there is a compelling public health emergency of international concern and it is the only way information can be provided in a “timely and accurate format.”
Ssekamwa, the digital rights expert who also founded and runs the African Centre for Digital Justice, said there are important questions that haven’t been answered by the Ugandan government.
“Does the U.S. have appropriate data protections? Can the systems provide anonymized data? Are they really up to that standard?” said Ssekamwa. “If I’m someone who has had health issues, can you deny me a visa because of the health issues I’m having?”
Psaki, the former global health security coordinator, worried about the haste with which the changes to data access are happening. “Even in the best of circumstances, you can’t go from having parallel data systems that were established over 20-plus years to finding some way to integrate those data systems in six months.”
Speed has been a hallmark of the America First global health effort. In September, just a month after Smith joined the State Department, it launched the strategy at an event co-sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and five large pharmaceutical companies. By November, Smith was crisscrossing the African continent with a small team of negotiators, trying to persuade dignitaries to agree to deals.
The State Department said the deals were “negotiated in a thoughtful and strategic way over many months.”
On Dec. 4, Kenya became the first country to sign, during a triumphant celebration with Rubio and President William Ruto in Washington. Outcry over the agreement had already begun two days earlier, when a Kenyan activist named Nelson Amenya announced on the social platform X that he had seen a sample of the specimen-sharing agreement as well as a legal analysis that showed it would violate Kenyan law.
As a condition for receiving $1.6 billion in aid, the Kenyan government agreed to provide access to seven years’ worth of health records — two years longer than the U.S. would provide financial support.
Although the Kenyan data-sharing agreement states that the U.S. will take “all reasonable measures to protect the confidentiality of information” and abide by American and Kenyan laws, Amenya worried that wouldn’t be enough. “Every HIV test, TB diagnosis, malaria case – accessible to US officials,” he wrote in the post, which now has one million views. “Your medical records, your children’s health data – all exposed.”
A few days later, a Kenyan senator named Okiya Omtatah sued members of the Kenyan government over the agreement, arguing that it poses a threat to citizens’ constitutional right to privacy by “allowing broad foreign access to sensitive data.” A Kenyan nonprofit also sued, and more than 50 groups weighed in on their side, describing the document as giving the U.S. “excessive access” to African data and raising the possibility of serious human rights violations.
In court filings, the Kenyan government argued that it is obligated to achieve the “highest attainable standard of health” and that it is unable to do that on its own. After blocking the deal for months, in May, the Kenyan court temporarily allowed implementation of the agreement to proceed while it considers the case.
Since outrage bubbled up in Kenya, some other countries have negotiated shorter terms for sharing data and pandemic specimens, and have inserted additional protections, according to the Public Citizen analysis.
Revealing whether someone has had an abortion, mental health condition, substance use treatment or sexually transmitted disease can be devastating anywhere. In Africa, research has shown it can lead to discrimination and violence. And even when personal information has been removed, individuals in “anonymized” data can be reidentified using AI and other tools.
The Ugandan data-sharing agreement calls for the U.S. government to “promptly notify the Government of Uganda of any unauthorized access” in such cases and requires the parties to conduct a joint breach assessment and remediation plan afterward. But by that point, it may be too late, Ssekamwa fears. “Once the data gets out of Uganda, we are skeptical that the government of Uganda will actually have any power to control it,” he said.
The secrecy around both the negotiations and the agreements has raised further suspicions. The State Department has declined to share the agreements, telling ProPublica the agency will release them when negotiations with all partner governments are complete and describing its actions as “protecting sensitive negotiations—not ‘secrecy.’” In response to a public records request filed by ProPublica, the State Department said it planned to provide the documents in September 2027. The advocacy group Public Citizen recently filed suit against the federal government in an effort to obtain the documents.
“Why are they hiding the agreement if they think the terms are OK?” asked Bernard Okpi, a Nigerian lawyer who sued his government in March, alleging that the deal violates the country’s constitutional right to privacy and promotes religious discrimination by prioritizing funding for Christian faith-based health facilities. That suit is pending, and the Nigerian government did not respond to questions from ProPublica.
The State Department said that the agreement with Nigeria “was negotiated in connection with reforms the Nigerian government has made to prioritize protecting Christian populations from violence.”
The Trump administration says that its new global health strategy is designed to save lives and keep the U.S. — and the world — safe from disease outbreaks. But ultimately its hard-driving and secretive negotiations may work against those goals.
While the administration aspired to strike agreements with 50 nations, including the three countries that walked away from negotiations in part over concerns about data sharing, it has fallen far short of that number. (In Zambia, officials also balked at U.S. demands for critical minerals.) The loss of aid in those countries is already proving tobe devastating.
Despite the Trump administration’s stated goal of putting “America first,” the U.S. may feel the consequences of those failed negotiations, too, as mistrust compounds the loss of long-standing systems that provided care and responded to disease outbreaks.
“It’s in everyone’s interest to have a comprehensive approach to respond to an outbreak early,” said Psaki, who pointed to the quickly escalating number of Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo as evidence. While that country struck a healthcare deal with the U.S., five of the nine countries bordering it have not. “We need to get data and samples from all nine countries to collaborate effectively on that outbreak, and now we don’t have that.”
The State Department said the U.S. has responded swiftly to the outbreak and has provided over $270 million to the global fight against Ebola.
In Uganda, where people have also fallen sick and died from Ebola, Ssekamwa said that his country needs all the help that the healthcare deal can bring, including improved protection from outbreaks, but there needs to be more robust protection of people’s personal data.
“We are happy to benefit from the technological advancement and the fruits of big data,” he said. Instead, he said, “the U.S. has left so many gaps within the agreement, which can be exploited in their favor.”
Last year, the Marco Rubio-run State Department announced that it would start denying visas to people who worked in misinformation/disinformation research, content moderation, fact-checking, or other compliance and trust & safety roles. So, yeah, if you were an EU-based person who worked on preventing child sexual abuse material from appearing online, the US government decided you were not allowed in the country, bizarrely (and falsely) claiming you engaged in “censorship of protected expression.”
Except, as we’ve explained over and over again, that makes no sense. Only government officials or those working directly at the behest of the government can engage in censorship of protected expression. Otherwise it’s just private parties using their own rights of association to figure out what content they wish to associate with. And the actual reality (which MAGA culture warriors refuse to recognize) is that nearly all trust & safety work has fuck all to do with removing content. Much of it is literally about making platforms better and more trusted overall.
But, because the MAGA crew has been whipped up into a misinformation frenzy over the last decade that any research regarding mis- or disinformation is “censorship,” Trump and Rubio decided to throw the base some red meat and claim they were going to deny visas to people who worked in the field.
Thankfully, a federal court has pointed out that the only one engaging in censorship here is the Rubio State Department. By designating a group of people to be denied visas based on their own speech and association regarding disinformation research, the State Department engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.
Judge Boasberg (who traditionally has been pretty conservative, but with Trump nonsense appearing before him quite frequently seems to now recognize that this administration is full of shit) notes how silly all of this is. After highlighting that most users of websites actually do want those sites to block scams and spam (what most content moderation is), though admitting that some people think of it as censorship, he points out that Rubio’s policy punishes researchers (the plaintiffs in this case) for trying to research and fact check disinformation.
The First Amendment reflects “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” N.Y. Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964). That commitment is not confined to stump speeches, editorials, or familiar forms of political advocacy….
Those principles cover the activity chilled here. CITR’s work depends on researchers who study how platforms structure public debate, report on misinformation and disinformation, advocate for access to platform data, petition officials, speak to the press, and collaborate with one another to set standards and press for reform. Some of that work culminates in reports, interviews, comments, petitions, and testimony. Some of it occurs before publication, in the candid exchange among researchers and organizations that makes public-facing work possible. Those activities, at least as reflected in this record, fall within the Amendment’s protection for speech, publication, petitioning, and expressive association. They also sit directly within the contested public debate over how online platforms structure discourse and whether, when, and how they should moderate harmful or false content….
CITR’s asserted injury is therefore not merely derivative of what its noncitizen members might say or what CITR might hear. The policy allegedly impairs CITR’s own work: who will contribute to its reports, what those reports can say, who will attach their names to them, and whether researchers will participate in the convenings and candid exchanges from which CITR’s public work emerges. See supra Section III.A.2.a. That is itself a First Amendment burden, as the Amendment protects both an organization’s creation and dissemination of information, Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., 564 U.S. 552, 570 (2011), and the associational activity that makes collective speech possible….
The judge points out that the visa policy is already having an impact on this kind of research:
The reaction here was not merely predictable; it was all but ordered. Announcing the enforcement actions against leaders of two CITR member organizations, Rubio warned others engaged in the same work to “reverse course” or face the same. … The record shows that the message landed. Member A has refrained from international travel, including to CITR’s 2025 summit in Berlin, because of fear of being denied reentry under the policy; has limited public advocacy with CITR to a behind-the-scenes role because of fear of detention and deportation; and says that he or she would be substantially more likely to resume public association with CITR were the policy no longer in place…. Dr. Emma L. Briant, a U.K. citizen and Visiting Associate Professor at Notre Dame, likewise avers that the policy has caused her to self-censor in her writing and public speaking, hesitate to travel internationally, and evaluate even domestic speaking invitations against the risk of detention or deportation.
The judge calls out how the State Department started combing through visa applications to block “ordinary work” done by researchers and fact checkers, not limited to anyone actually engaged in any “censorship.”
The December cable supplies part of the answer. It directed consular officers to “thoroughly explore” visa applicants’ work histories, resumes, social-media profiles, and media appearances for involvement in “combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety,” and, on locating it, to pursue a finding of ineligibility…. Those categories do not describe the exercise of foreign sovereign power. They describe the ordinary work of researchers, fact checkers, platform employees, compliance officers, and nonprofit advocates who study, criticize, participate in, or press for content moderation. A cable that treats that work as evidence of immigration ineligibility reaches far beyond the coercive acts described in the May Memo: threats of arrest, payment freezes, legal compulsion, detention, fines, and demands for private data directed at American platforms or persons in the United States.
While the Court declines to review specific visa denials, it notes that the State Department clearly seems to be denying visas to people by claiming “censorship” when they had nothing to do with censorship. Indeed, the denials usually were about the State Department punishing people for First Amendment protected speech that the US government didn’t like. None of the justifications appear to actually be censorial:
The actions matter because State held them out as examples of the policy at work. Its public rationales identify the activity it treats as “complicity” in “censorship”: a report on hate speech and disinformation, advocacy directed at advertisers and platforms, disinformation-risk ratings, a petition for researcher access to platform data, a broadcast interview, and nonprofit leadership in organizations that help targets of online abuse seek removal of content aimed at them… Some of those justifications are tied to familiar First Amendment activity: reporting, speaking, petitioning, advocating for platform regulation, and associating through nonprofit leadership. Id. At least as to the private researchers and nonprofit leaders in CITR’s field, the public explanations do not identify any exercise of foreign sovereign power akin to the coercive acts the May Memo enumerates.
As Judge Boasberg notes, if you call all of that “complicity in censorship” then the term “censorship” has no real meaning:
If disinformation-risk ratings, reports on hate speech, petitions for platform-data access, advocacy, or nonprofit work seeking to limit abusive content can count as “complicity” in “censorship,” the policy has no clear stopping point short of the field itself — a concern sharpened by the Department’s announcement that it “stands ready and willing to expand” the list…. A lawful permanent resident working on a platform’s trust-and-safety team, a noncitizen researcher urging stronger disinformation labels, a compliance employee helping apply moderation rules, or an advocacy leader pressing advertisers away from sites that spread falsehoods could reasonably understand the policy to place their immigration status at risk — not because they wield foreign sovereign power or facilitate its censorship, but simply because they work in content moderation.
In its response, the DOJ pulled the usual MAGA nonsense of stomping its feet and just repeating “but content moderation is censorship” and making vague assertions about how these researchers aid foreign governments in censorship. The judge is not impressed.
The trouble is that the enforcement record does not honor that line. The Government has tied none of the private researchers and nonprofit leaders targeted in December to any exercise of foreign sovereign power. Pressed on that gap, counsel did not supply the missing connection. The Government stepped back from the five examples, explaining that it lacked “the full factual records or the reasons for those determinations” and that it would not be “fair to rely on those five” in gauging the policy’s scope…. But Defendants cannot publicly announce examples of the policy at work, warn that the Department stands ready to expand them, and then — when those examples prove inconvenient — deny that they reveal anything about the policy’s reach. A limiting principle that the Government cannot reconcile with its own enforcement record is no limit at all.
And thus, all this is classic, unconstitutional, viewpoint discrimination:
The policy, at its core, does not burden all speech about platforms, all research into content moderation, or all advocacy about online harms. It presses its enforcement thumb against one side of the scale: the view that platforms should do more to moderate content, label disinformation, restrict abuse, share data with researchers, or take responsibility for the harms their systems amplify. The Government, in other words, has not set itself against everyone who speaks about platform governance. It has set itself against those whose work favors more moderation rather than less. A noncitizen calling for less moderation, after all, has no comparable reason for concern under the policy.
Such action lies at the core of viewpoint discrimination. “At its most basic, the test for viewpoint discrimination is whether — within the relevant subject category — the government has singled out a subset of messages for disfavor based on the views expressed.” ….
The First Amendment does not permit officials to resolve that dispute by attaching legal burdens to the side they condemn
But that’s exactly what Rubio did here. If you worked on calling out disinformation, you could get your visa denied (or if you already had it, pulled). Judge Boasberg notes that if the policy were actually limited to foreign officials engaged in censorship, then the State Department might have an argument. But it’s not.
Even better, the court states that you can’t just call disinformation research “censorship” and pretend that’s a fact when reality says otherwise:
Protecting Americans from foreign officials who use sovereign power to suppress protected expression in the United States is in the Government’s interest. But the record does not show that the policy serves only that end. It instead brands a range of private expressive and platform-governance activity as “censorship,” without identifying any foreign-sovereign power that those actors exercised or helped exercise. The Government cannot make protected private expression a facially legitimate and bona fide basis for immigration consequences simply by placing it under the capacious and contested label of “censorship.”
He even notes that policy would violate the First Amendment under lower levels of scrutiny, meaning that even if the government could convince the court there was some justification for the policy, it still wouldn’t survive First Amendment scrutiny.
The judge doesn’t kill the policy entirely, noting that there may be cases where the State Department has a legitimate reason to deny a visa to someone actually engaged in efforts to silence Americans. It also hurts that when the Court sought evidence of visas being denied to actual censorship by sovereign officials, the State Department apparently came up empty:
The Department reportedly examined whether European regulators were using the Digital Services Act to censor American speech and found “no evidence that Member States of the European Union are overreaching the [Digital Services Act] to censor and criminalize online content.”
Oops! Sure, that goes against the narrative Rubio and MAGA folks have spun up about the EU being nothing but a bunch of censors, but when they can’t show the court any proof that they’re using this policy to go after actual government censors (while the plaintiffs can show where the policy was used to suppress or punish the speech of non-government censors) the end results are unlikely to make Rubio happy.
Measured against one another, the policy’s legitimate applications ultimately do not carry the day. The mismatch between Defendants’ asserted interest and the policy’s demonstrated operation is stark…. The defect identified above is not a feature of any one application; it is the policy’s selection criteria itself, and it travels wherever the policy does — into visa screening, exclusion, and removal alike. The policy’s legitimate applications, by contrast, remain episodic and largely undemonstrated. Whatever arithmetic might refine the comparison, the overbreadth inquiry asks whether a measure “prohibits a substantial amount of protected speech relative to its plainly legitimate sweep,” Hansen, 599 U.S. at 770, and a policy that selects its targets by an unconstitutional criteria, while its lawful uses remain occasional and largely unproven, answers that question.
Thus, the Court throws out this particular visa policy, though it doesn’t go quite as far as the researchers asked in requesting a protective order that would bar the government from using information related to this case in an immigration enforcement action. The judge recognizes that it’s still possible that the government could retaliate against these researchers, but hopes that this ruling will make them think twice about doing so. It also notes that if the government ramps up threats or actual retaliation against the researchers in this case, they can return to the courtroom to contest those actions.
For years, the loudest voices screaming about a “Biden censorship industrial complex” falsely insisted that pointing out disinformation was itself an attack on free speech. Now a federal court has found an actual, textbook case of unconstitutional censorship — carried out by the Secretary of State explicitly stripping visas from researchers based on their protected speech. I’m sure we’ll be hearing the same kind of outrage about Biden officials asking social media companies if they could be better in stopping health misinformation from spreading?
It’s absolutely irritating to be living under the thumb of an administration filled to the brim with facile subservients who think they’re the biggest and best people to ever walk the earth. It’s a bunch of boys pretending to be men, right up until they have to talk to the boss, at which point they return to their innate yes man positioning.
It’s even worse that this entire government pretends to be the biggest badasses around (DEPARTMENT OF WAR! SOCIAL MEDIA BLOODSPORT!). Everyone knows it isn’t, but everyone in this administration pretends otherwise. It’s the pettiest, weakest presidency we’ve ever endured, continually propped up by lackeys who think we’re fooled by its manliest-of-the-men facade. Even the most tentative jab will reveal the facade is mostly balsa and rice paper.
But even if this government is loaded with weak men and weak-willed men who serve/worship them, it still has a considerable amount of power. That allows it to perpetually punch down, targeting the people least likely to fight back.
This is the level of “government” this abhorrent death cruise of a presidency delivers on a daily basis: the multiplied force of the federal government being brought to bear against a single human being who dared to criticize a foreign politician. Yes! You are reading that correctly!
The Trump administration detained a Colombian immigrant this week in Phoenix after he spoke out against a Trump-endorsed candidate in his home country’s upcoming presidential election.
Franklin Humberto Coral Garrido, a progressive online activist known as Beto Coral, is a supporter of President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, a leftist who has clashed with President Trump. He has publicly criticized Abelardo De La Espriella, a right-wing candidate backed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Coral was arrested by immigration authorities on Tuesday, the same day Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a memo determining that he was deportable from the United States.
That’s all it takes to get on Trump’s radar. And, apparently, that’s all it takes for bitch boy Rubio to fire up his MS Office Suite to compose a memo making this singleperson a priority for immigration officers. It’s even stupider that it first appears. Not only was Rubio prompted (most likely by his boss) to write this memo authorizing Coral’s detention, but he told his underlings this was justified entirely by Coral’s decision to utilize the rights afforded to him by the US Constitution:
“Coral Garrido has used his presence in the United States to conduct political activity in support of the Petro government” and has advocated against a candidate for president, Mr. Rubio wrote, according to a copy of the memo obtained by The New York Times.
That is not an arrestable/detainable offense! Like it or not, MAGA bigots, constitutional rights are given to US residents, even if they’re not currently citizens. There’s a very good reason for that — one that will never be fully appreciated by the MAGA faithful until they travel outside of this country and are subjected solely to local laws like cane beatings, summary executions, etc. for things that would at least get you a nominally fair trial in the US. The memo written by Rubio says things it definitely shouldn’t say, like this guy needs to be detained because he engaged in free speech.
Whether this is a leading indicator or just the tip of the ICEberg hardly matters. What does matter is that the government isn’t allowed to do this. And criticism of a foreign presidential hopeful should never form the basis for arrest or detention. Our freedom to criticize our own government is enshrined, cherished, and treated with the utmost respect (for the most part) by our court system. We — and by that I also mean any person currently residing on US soil — should be doubly free to criticize foreign governments without fear of reprisal.
But reprisal is all this government has. It can’t win hearts and minds, nor does it care to. It likes Stockholm Syndrome and the beaten dog dynamics of Trump’s relationship with his political appointees. It doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. The problem here is that the administration believes “not caring” is the same thing as “being right.” For now, though, rights still matter. Rubio’s proactive toadying doesn’t wish the Constitution into the cornfield. And if natural-born Americans think this administration won’t come after them if they displease Trump, they’re wrong. We’re only 18 months into this presidency that has already compared mild dissent to outright terrorism and insurrection. It’s not going to stop just because it’s run out of outspoken migrants to detain.
While we’ve focused a great deal on RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines in America, it’s worth remembering that his ambitions for making people sicker extend beyond the American border. We’ve already discussed Kennedy’s 2019 trip to Samoa, where he used the unfortunate accidental mixing of vaccine doses with muscle relaxers that killed two young children, about which he appears to have lied to Congress during his confirmation hearing. Once in office, roughly a year ago, Kennedy also decided to pull all funding from Gavi, an international public/private partnership to get vaccines to underserved nations, claiming that there would be no American funding because it “ignored vaccine safety”. He followed that up in April of this year by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars that Congress had appropriated for international vaccination programs for the same reason.
Kennedy says the children are getting obsolete shots with dangerous ingredients that the U.S. has long since phased out. He is holding up $600 million Congress appropriated for the vaccines to pressure the international humanitarian group, Gavi, that distributes them.
“Gavi has refused to provide the United States with the specific data, studies, or detailed accounting of how U.S. funds are used,” Emily Hilliard, senior press secretary at the Health and Human Services Department, said in a statement to POLITICO.
That’s an excuse, of course. Kennedy doesn’t like vaccines, so he’s keeping poor people around the world from getting them. It’s as simple as that. Why he’s been allowed to veto the powers of the purse in Congress as the Secretary of HHS is a question that can be answered by pointing and laughing at our feckless Congress, but the result is the poorest human beings in the world being less protected from dangerous, infectious diseases.
It’s easy to be anti-vax when you aren’t confronted with the realities of these diseases. When, however, you get a vicious outbreak of a new strain of Ebola in Africa, and you start seeing pictures and hearing stories about the rashes, the uncontrollable bleeding, the piercing stomach pain, and the fountains of waste leaking out of people, well, that seems to have a way of clarifying the mind.
I can’t think of a better explanation as to why Marco Rubio informed Congress recently that the State Dept. was going to get involved to get us back to funding Gavi to combat this and other diseases.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that the U.S. would re-engage with the global vaccine alliance Gavi amid the Ebola outbreak in several African countries. Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the decision had been made a few weeks ago to re-engage, after the Trump administration pulled funding from Gavi last year.
Rubio said that Secretary Kennedy had taken a leading role in determining what was going to happen next with Gavi, but the State Department would now re-engage because “we need to drive this to an outcome”.
“The State Department a few weeks ago made the decision that we were going to re-engage on this issue of Gavi, respecting what HHS’ (Department of Health and Human Services) views are on it as well,” Rubio said. “We’d like to get this issue resolved in an outcome that’s acceptable both to Congress and also to our goals on global health.”
Rubio can massage the messaging on this all he likes, but it’s plain what is going on here. Craven as he may be in this current time, Rubio also isn’t an idiot. He damn well knows that outbreaks of infectious diseases, particularly those as horrifying as Ebola, will eventually impact his State Department and the homeland. This is him figuring out how to get an actual adult in the room to counteract Kennedy’s obstinate insanity.
And given that we don’t really know yet just how bad this Ebola outbreak is, it’s understandable that Gavi is sighing in relief at this news.
Gavi’s chief executive Sania Nishtar said she was “very encouraged” by Rubio’s remarks.
“Unlocking the funds that Congress has appropriated to Gavi would enable us to keep the world safe from infectious disease threats,” she said in a statement. Gavi’s work on Bundibugyo underlined the importance of this work, she said.
Between the courts and the Trump administration itself, there has been a great deal of blocking, tamping down, and walking back RFK Jr.’s activities.
Remember when the Biden administration set up something called the “Disinformation Governance Board” and the entire MAGA universe lost its collective mind? It was the “Ministry of Truth.” It was “government speech police.” It was the single most Orwellian thing any American administration had ever done in the history of civilization. Nina Jankowicz, the researcher tapped to lead it, received death threats. The whole thing was shut down within weeks because of the outcry.
Of course, all of it was an exaggeration. That board was actually set up to coordinate efforts to counter foreign disinformation — not to police Americans’ speech. We said so at the time, even while criticizing DHS for the monumentally stupid way they named and rolled it out. The name was terrible. The communication around it was worse. But the underlying mission — helping coordinate the government’s own efforts to respond to (not censor) foreign influence operations — was legitimate and, frankly, important in this era of information warfare.
Well, Secretary of State Marco Rubio just signed a cable doing something that sounds vaguely similar, but way worse. Specifically, he’s directing U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide to launch coordinated campaigns countering foreign propaganda — and the cable explicitly endorses Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative” tool for the effort. It also admits that this is pure psyops work:
The cable instructs those embassies and consulates to pursue five broad goals: countering hostile messaging, expanding access to information, exposing adversary behavior, elevating local voices who support American interests, and promoting what it calls “telling America’s story”. Embassies are told to recruit local influencers, academics and community leaders abroad to carry counter-propaganda messaging, an approach designed to make American-funded narratives feel locally organic rather than centrally directed.
“These campaigns seek to shift blame to the United States, sow division among allies, promote alternative worldviews antithetical to America’s interests, and even undermine American economic interests and political freedoms,” the cable says. “Using digital platforms, state-controlled media, and influence operations, they pose a direct threat to US national security and fuel hostility toward American interests.”
Notably, the cable tells diplomatic offices to coordinate their work with “the Department of War’s Psychological Operations” – the military unit more commonly known as Miso, or Military Information Support Operations, formerly Psyop, which is part of the Pentagon.
This is far more expansive than anything the Disinformation Governance Board ever even contemplated — and the same people who screamed about the Ministry of Truth are, once again, completely silent.
The idea that the State Department would issue a formal cable endorsing a specific social media platform by name as a tool of U.S. diplomacy—let alone military psychological operations—would have been, until recently, almost unthinkable. But the structural transformation that has taken place over years has made the news feel almost ordinary today. It was a transformation that dismantled, piece by piece, the legal accountability, operational independence and institutional resilience that once made such a cozy relationship between government and platforms inconceivable.
And see if any of this sounds familiar:
Rubio identifies five operational goals—countering hostile messaging, expanding information access, exposing adversarial behavior, elevating local voices sympathetic to U.S. interests, and “telling America’s story”—and instructs embassies to recruit local influencers and community leaders to carry U.S.-funded narratives in ways designed to feel organically local rather than centrally directed.
Why, that sounds quite similar to what the Biden DHS said about the Disinformation Governance Board. Except, suddenly: no partisan freakout. No weeks of stories on Fox News. No screaming in the NY Post about speech police. Gee. I wonder why.
The U.S. State Department is instructing embassies to recruit local influencers to carry U.S.-funded narratives in ways designed to feel organically local rather than centrally directed. This is, by definition, a covert influence operation. It’s the kind of thing that, when other countries do it, we call propaganda. It’s the kind of thing the Global Engagement Center was specifically designed to expose.
Oh, right. About the Global Engagement Center.
You may recall that one of the early moves of the returning Trump administration was to shut down the GEC, the State Department office specifically created to help identify and counter foreign influence campaigns. At the time, Rubio — the same Marco Rubio who just signed this cable — framed the shutdown as a free speech victory:
Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving. This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.
That was always a lie. The GEC (just like the Disinformation Governance Board) didn’t “silence and censor” Americans. It studied foreign influence campaigns — the kind run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, by ISIS recruitment networks, by Chinese state-linked information operations — and helped expose them. It’s the kind of work that requires sustained expertise, institutional knowledge, and sophisticated analytical capacity. The kind of thing you can’t just spin up overnight when you suddenly realize you need it.
So all of the hand-wringing about the Disinformation Governance Board, the GEC, and the idea that governments were too close to social media platforms was a bunch of nonsense all along. It was always about trying to gain and then keep power, destroying the institutions that dealt with foreign disinformation campaigns until they could capture them for their own purposes.
Klonick traces how Twitter/X became susceptible to exactly this kind of capture:
Musk systematically dismantled Twitter’s trust, safety, and content moderation infrastructure. The teams that had worked, however imperfectly, to maintain platform integrity not just for commercial reasons but to limit the spread of coordinated inauthentic behavior, state-linked influence operations, and targeted harassment were gone within months of Musk’s ownership. With both the corporate accountability architecture and the internal operational safeguards stripped away, the platform’s amplification and suppression mechanics became, in effect, tools that could be deployed at anyone’s, but namely Musk’s, discretion.
Before Musk’s acquisition, the major US tech platforms — whatever their flaws — generally bent over backwards to avoid being captured as instruments of state messaging.
The Rubio cable, on the other hand, specifically endorses X’s Community Notes feature as a tool for countering “anti-American propaganda operations without compromising free speech.” Klonick correctly identifies this as:
…a remarkable exercise in circular reasoning: the government endorsing, for use in state-directed information operations, a moderation tool on a platform owned by a former (and perhaps still current) senior government advisor.
But it’s worse than circular reasoning. Community Notes is a crowdsourced system. Its outputs are determined by which users participate and how they coordinate. While it’s (actually very cleverly) designed to avoid brigading attacks, that does not mean it’s perfect in avoiding manipulation. If the U.S. government can organize sympathetic actors to use Community Notes to surface pro-American narratives as part of a formal PSYOP-adjacent campaign, then so can every other government on the planet. China can coordinate its own actors. Russia already runs exactly these kinds of operations. Iran has entire units dedicated to this. The cable essentially advertises to every adversary exactly how to game the system — and the people who actually understood these vulnerabilities, the trust & safety teams, the GEC researchers, the disinformation scholars, are exactly the people this administration spent years attacking and driving out of their jobs.
Oh, unless they expect Elon Musk to tilt the playing field to their advantage — which is exactly the kind of thing these very same people were loudly freaking out about when Biden was president.
Now, some might point out that the broader “censorship industrial complex” crusade wasn’t only about counter-messaging efforts like the DGB and the GEC. It was also about the Murthy v. Missouri case, which dealt with something categorically different: the allegation that the Biden administration pressured platforms to remove third-party users’ speech. The Rubio cable, by contrast, directs government employees themselves to use the platform for their own messaging. These are genuinely different things.
But the supposed animating principle behind the entire crusade was that the government had no business being entangled with social media platforms on matters of information and speech. Not just “the government shouldn’t pressure platforms to remove user content,” but the much broader claim that any government-platform coordination on information amounted to a sinister censorship machine.
Jim Jordan’s “censorship industrial complex” hearings didn’t just target White House communications with platform trust & safety teams. They went after researchers. They went after the GEC. They went after nonprofits studying foreign manipulation. The message was that any institutional involvement in the information ecosystem was inherently suspect. That principle, it turns out, had an expiration date — specifically, January 20, 2025.
And remember, in the Murthy case itself, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the Biden admin’s communications with platforms constituted coercion. The plaintiffs couldn’t even establish standing because they couldn’t show the government actually changed platform behavior. Meta felt totally comfortable telling the White House “no” — as Zuckerberg himself admitted repeatedly on Joe Rogan, just weeks before telling Elon he was happy to silence people at the Trump White House’s request.
So the same political movement that treated government staffers sending cranky emails — emails that platforms felt perfectly free to ignore — as an existential constitutional crisis now sees nothing wrong with a formal State Department cable directing coordination with a specific privately-owned platform and military PSYOP. If the principle only matters when your political opponents are the ones in the White House, it was always just about weaponizing the systems of government for your own benefit.
Klonick puts the broader structural picture together:
The privatization of Twitter removed all traces of public accountability. The gutting of content moderation infrastructure removed operational resistance. The political alliance between the administration and the tech sector removed institutional resistance. And now a formal diplomatic cable removes the last pretense of arms-length separation between U.S. government messaging objectives and the platforms that carry them.
The legal questions that Murthy left unresolved—about when government pressure on private platforms crosses the constitutional line—will almost certainly be relitigated in this new context. But the more immediate reality is that the internet Americans and global audiences navigate is increasingly shaped not merely by the preferences of platform owners and advertisers, but by the strategic communication objectives of the U.S. government, implemented through platforms that have every financial and regulatory reason to cooperate.
This is the pattern we’ve watched unfold for years: wrap your power grab in the language of the thing you’re destroying. Call fact-checking “censorship.” Call attempts to expose foreign influence campaigns “the speech police.” Dismantle the institutions that actually did the thing you claim to value, then use the resulting vacuum to do exactly what you falsely accused your opponents of doing — only bigger, more openly, and with military coordination.
The sheer audacity of the sequencing is what makes all of this so infuriating. They spent years pointing at the Disinformation Governance Board and screaming “Ministry of Truth!” They shut down the Global Engagement Center while Rubio called it censorship. They destroyed the research infrastructure and the institutional knowledge that actually helped identify and counter foreign influence operations. And now, having cleared the field of anyone who might push back, they’re running their own influence operations through a platform with no independent oversight, no transparency mechanisms, and no institutional resistance — and they’re doing it openly, through formal diplomatic channels, in coordination with military psychological operations.
Klonick closes with the right question:
The question is no longer whether the government can use social media as a tool of statecraft. It already is. The question now is whether any institution—legal, normative, or structural—retains the capacity to check it.
Given that the people who claimed to care about checking government entanglement with social media are now the ones wielding it most aggressively — and spent years systematically destroying every institution that might have served as a check — don’t hold your breath.
