Tom Nichols: A Witch Hunt at the State Department

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/trump-diplomacy-darren-beattie/682665/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/w6vJB

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

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

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

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

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

*snip*