from the the-reveal-matters-more-than-the-evidence dept
Earlier this year, soon after Elon Musk began stripping away parts of the government he had no constitutional authority to destroy, we warned that it appeared officials in the White House were gearing up to use the Twitter Files playbook on the US government.
The basics of the playbook are as follows:
- Search through copious amounts of internal messaging and documents for anything that can be positioned (usually misleadingly) to be spun by ignorant idiots as damning.
- Feed that work to a group of the most credulous, simping journalists that can be found.
- Let them run with reports on those “released” documents, which will massively misrepresent the reality within them.
- Sit back and relax as the totally false made-up narrative is considered “accepted truth” by a large segment of the population (even those outside of the MAGA brainwash cult).
As Charlie Warzel aptly explained, this approach works because “what mattered more was the mere existence of a dump of primary-source documents — a collection of once-private information that they could cast as nefarious in order to justify what they believed all along.”
The evidence itself is secondary to the performance of “revelation.”
And now it appears this playbook is set to play out at the State Department.
Darren Beattie is a top State Department official who had been in the first Trump administration before being fired for speaking at a white nationalist conference, and who later founded an independent news site mostly known for having effectively no credibility and pushing utter nonsense that somehow always seems to align with the MAGA cult view of the world.
Last week, MIT’s Tech Review revealed that one of the things Beattie has done at the State Department is begin a total witch hunt for documents he can use to mislead the public in Twitter Files-like fantasyland.
The document, originally shared in person with roughly a dozen State Department employees in early March, requested staff emails and other records with or about a host of individuals and organizations that track or write about foreign disinformation—including Atlantic journalist Anne Applebaum, former US cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, and the Stanford Internet Observatory—or have criticized President Donald Trump and his allies, such as the conservative anti-Trump commentator Bill Kristol.
The document also seeks 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.”
For several people who received or saw the document, the broad requests for unredacted information felt like a “witch hunt,” one official says—one that could put the privacy and security of numerous individuals and organizations at risk.
Specifically, Beattie went looking at the internal documents for the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub, which was set up to — as it says on the tin — counter foreign information manipulation.
As we’ve discussed for quite some time now, the MAGA world insists that any discussion of “countering foreign manipulation” is really a cover story for “censoring domestic truths.” That’s never been the case, and it makes MAGA people look very foolish every time they make this claim, but it won’t stop them.
People within the State Department who have called this out as problematic are drastically understating what’s really happening. They’re treating this like a simple records request gone wrong, rather than recognizing it as part of a calculated disinformation campaign (which is ironic, since they’re supposed to be the disinfo experts):
Several State Department staffers call the records requests “unusual” and “improper” in their scope. MIT Technology Review spoke to three people who had personally seen the document, as well as two others who were aware of it; we agreed to allow them to speak anonymously due to their fears of retaliation.
While they acknowledge that previous political appointees have, on occasion, made information requests through the records management system, Beattie’s request was something wholly different.
Never had “an incoming political appointee” sought to “search through seven years’ worth of all staff emails to see whether anything negative had been said about his friends,” says one staffer.
Another staffer calls it a “pet project” for Beattie.
While it certainly is improper for Beattie to be doing this, it seems likely that it’s about a lot more than finding out whether or not anyone in this group said anything mean about Beattie and his friends. Assuming this follows from past practice around the Twitter Files or Jim Jordan’s weaponizing of his congressional committee against anyone he believes is insufficiently willing to suck up to Trump, it appears that the intent here is to publish out of context, misleading versions of what they find to try to justify the false claims that operations like R/FIMI are actual part of the “censorship industrial complex.”
Tech Review has published an excerpt of Beattie’s “sensitive but unclassified” request for records, which shows just how unserious this is:
That’s literally “please do a search of previous records for any time anyone mentioned me or my shit-peddling friends.”
It also asks for any documents with a long list of “keywords” or “phrases” related to topics that the MAGA world obsesses over:
If you don’t soak your brain regularly in the vats of the MAGA world’s distortion field, you might not realize there are specific stories behind most of these, but you can tell that this is a mass fishing expedition, to see if the State Department was calling out the absolutely constant flood of bullshit that Beattie and his friends were peddling throughout the majority of the Biden administration, while also checking to see if the State Department folks had been calling out how the nonsense peddlers were coming from inside house.
It’s likely that some of these topics came up at some point or another, though generally under the context of whether foreign adversaries were looking to use domestic culture war controversies to stir up more anger and divisiveness. But if there are any mentions of any of this we’ll be hearing for days upon days from the names listed that it was an example of the government being “weaponized” against them, when the reality will likely be more along the lines of “get a load of this useful idiot pushing nonsense again.”
Meanwhile, rest assured that this fishing expedition is, itself, an example of an illegal weaponization of the government against people for their own speech and expression regarding how best to respond to things like purposeful disinformation. That’s because many of Beattie’s targets appear to be the voices most associated with researching disinformation and the ways to counter it (which, again, don’t mean “censorship” and quite frequently mean “with more speech.”)
Also included among the nearly 60 individuals and organizations caught up in Beattie’s information dragnet are Bill Gates; the open-source journalism outlet Bellingcat; former FBI special agent Clint Watts; Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister; Daniel Fried, a career State Department official and former US ambassador to Poland; Renée DiResta, an expert in online disinformation who led research at Stanford Internet Observatory; and Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board at the US Department of Homeland Security.
[….]
Labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” the document lays out Beattie’s requests in 12 separate, but sometimes repetitive, bullet points. In total, he sought communications about 16 organizations, including Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), as well as with and about 39 individuals.
Notably, this includes several journalists: In addition to Bellingcat and Applebaum, the document also asks for communications with NBC News senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny.
The Tech Review article says that it’s unlikely there will be all that much responsive to these requests because that’s not what these organizations actually do:
(Staffers say they doubt that Beattie will find much, unless, one says, it’s “previous [FOIA] queries from people like Beattie” or discussions about “some Russian or PRC [Chinese] narrative that includes some of this stuff.”)
But, again, just as with the Twitter Files, that is unlikely to matter that much. Something will be found that can be presented out of context or surrounded with a bunch of misinformation to make it appear like something it is not. We’ve seen this before.
And, as the article notes, that’s definitely in the works:
Five weeks after Beattie made his requests for information, the State Department shut down R/FIMI.
An hour after staff members were informed, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio published a blog post announcing the news on the Federalist, one of the outlets that sued the GEC over allegations of censorship. He then discussed in an interview with the influential right-wing Internet personality Mike Benz plans for Beattie to lead a “transparency effort.”
“What we have to do now—and Darren will be big involved in that as well—is sort of document what happened … because I think people who were harmed deserve to know that, and be able to prove that they were harmed,” Rubio told Benz.
This is what Beattie—and Benz—have long called for. Many of the names and keywords he included in his request reflect conspiracy theories and grievances promoted by Revolver News—which Beattie founded after being fired from his job as a speechwriter during the first Trump administration when CNN reported that he had spoken at a conference with white nationalists.
Ultimately, the State Department staffers say they fear that a selective disclosure of documents, taken out of context, could be distorted to fit any kind of narrative Beattie, Rubio, or others create.
Actual people with knowledge of what’s going on or how this works will have two choices:
- Put in the ridiculous amount of work and effort to debunk the misleading narratives that will come out of this, while at a disadvantage of not having all of the details or documents
- Just shut up and let the narrative overwhelm the wider ecosystem, even breaking out of MAGA confines into the general public
Neither is a great situation — and that’s by design. The Muskian/MAGA world knows that manufacturing bullshit takes minutes, while properly debunking it takes days or weeks of painstaking work. The asymmetry is the point.
Tom Nichols wrote about this at The Atlantic, suggesting that this whole thing is “strange” given that the Twitter files “revealed very little” and assumes that it’s more about creating a kind of blacklist of “bad people” in the government or that he’s trying to “chill any contact between his office and people or organizations who have not passed the administration’s political purity tests.”
That might have something to do with it, but I think it misreads the MAGA world’s steadfast belief that the Twitter Files actually “revealed” a vast, horrendous, “censorship industrial complex” in which the “Biden Crime Family” would direct Twitter to delete patriotic posts of people revealing “the truth” about COVID and the 2020 election. That it did literally none of that doesn’t matter. The narrative is all that matters, and Beattie is looking for scraps to feed the narrative.
I think a different piece at The Atlantic, by Charlie Warzel, gets this part more correct:
The Twitter Files did show that the company made editorial decisions—for example, limiting reach on posts from several large accounts that had flaunted Twitter’s rules, including those of the Stanford doctor (and current National Institutes of Health head) Jay Bhattacharya, the right-wing activists Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, and Chaya Raichik, who operates the Libs of TikTok account. Not exactly breaking news to anyone who’d paid attention. But they also showed that, in some cases, Twitter employees and even Democratic lawmakers were opposed to or pushed back on government requests to take down content. Representative Ro Khanna, for example, reached out to Twitter’s executive leadership to express his frustration that Twitter was suppressing speech during its handling of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Of course, none of this stopped Musk from portraying the project as a Pentagon Papers–esque exercise in transparency. Teasing out the document dump back in December 2022, Musk argued that the series was proof of large-scale “violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment,” but then later admitted he had not read most of the files. This was fitting: For the Twitter Files’ target audience, the archives and their broader contexts were of secondary importance. What mattered more was the mere existence of a dump of primary-source documents—a collection of once-private information that they could cast as nefarious in order to justify what they believed all along. As I wrote in 2022, Twitter had been quite public about its de-amplification policies for accounts that violated its rules, but the screenshots of internal company documents included in the Twitter Files were interpreted by already aggrieved influencers and posters as evidence of malfeasance. This gave them ammunition to portray themselves as victims of a sophisticated, coordinated censorship effort.
For many, the Twitter Files were just another ephemeral culture-war skirmish. But for the MAGA sympathetic and right-leaning free-speech-warrior crowds, the files remain a canonical, even radicalizing event. RFK Jr. has argued on prime-time television that “I don’t think we’d have free speech in this country if it wasn’t for Elon Musk” opening up Twitter’s archives. Similarly, individuals mentioned in the files, such as the researcher and Atlantic contributor Renée DiResta, have become objects of obsession to MAGA conspiracy theorists. (“One post on X credited the imaginary me with ‘brainwashing all of the local elections officials’ to facilitate the theft of the 2020 election from Donald Trump,” DiResta wrote last year.) Simply put, the Twitter Files may have largely been full of sensationalistic claims and old news, but the gambit worked: Their release fleshed out a conspiratorial cinematic universe for devotees to glom on to.
So, as Warzel points out, Beattie’s efforts are “an attempt to add new characters and updated lore to this universe.”
The MAGA cinematic universe is about as connected to reality as the Marvel or Star Wars cinematic universes, yet they’re taken as true by a huge segment of the population. And, worse, even as it’s a matter of religious faith among the true MAGA cultists, the ideas behind them get laundered through so many people that they often breach that barrier.
To this day, I still hear from otherwise normal non-MAGA people, who think that the Twitter Files actually revealed “something bad” happening between Twitter and the government, they just think it probably wasn’t “as bad” as MAGA made it out to be. The reality that it revealed… basically nothing of interest, just doesn’t seem possible.
Beattie is trying to extend that to other parts of the government as well, and using that plan to protect his friends, and to attack and diminish the work of those who called out their bullshit.
Again, Warzel is directly on point:
Perhaps the records request could dredge up something concerning. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that there could be examples of bias or worse in a large tranche of private conversations between a government agency and outside organizations on a host of polarizing topics. But Beattie’s effort, as far as MIT described it, bears none of the hallmarks of an earnest push for transparency. Instead, it reeks of cynical politicking and using one’s privileged government position to access private information for political gain.
The point is not necessarily to find anything real, though that would be a nice bonus. The point is the act of “revealing” something which can then be weaponized to support prior claims, even if the actual evidence doesn’t support the claim. It’s not the evidence, but the structures that suggest evidence. Because these are “internal” communications that have been “revealed,” they must contain important valuable secrets, otherwise why would they be leaked.
It’s all part of the show, the kayfabe — a carefully choreographed performance where the trappings of revelation matter more than the substance. Beattie is following the Twitter Files playbook to the letter: gather documents, prep friendly media, and get ready for the spectacle. It’s a vibes-based narrative designed to work whether anything noteworthy is found or not. And if history is any guide, it will work again.
Filed Under: chilling effects, darren beattie, disinformation, fishing expedition, marco rubio, misinformation, narrative, state department, twitter files, witch hunt
