I’m on Kash Patel’s naughty list.
The subject line of this email is flippant, but the threat is anything but.
At 3:13 AM Eastern time on November 6, 2024, as it became clear that Donald Trump won the 2024 election, I received a reply from a user on Elon Musk’s X.com. It read simply: “We are going to deport you.”
I am a natural born citizen of the United States. My grandparents emigrated two and three generations ago, displaced by the World Wars that transformed Central and Eastern Europe into dangerous, deadly places. They worked hard. Some of them served in the American military. In many respects, they lived the American dream.
The user’s lust for my deportation had nothing to do with immigration status—not that the incoming Trump administration’s immigration fixation is moral, anyway—he believed I should be forcibly removed from the country I call home simply because I am among the most prominently demonized and slandered disinformation researchers. He is likely among the tens of millions of Americans whose trusted sources that made up lies about me censoring people.
The reply wasn’t remarkable in its vitriol. I’ve received worse; for over two years, as readers of my newsletter know, I have been the target of a sustained, nationwide harassment and hate campaign. It was the comment’s immediacy that took me aback. The election hadn’t yet been called, and somewhere, a white supremacist whose handle extolled a sixth century King responsible for bringing Christianity to the English was excited enough about the possibility he felt the new administration might provide to send me away that he publicly wrote to me about it in the middle of the night.
Within days of the election, Trump allies including Musk, tech tycoon Marc Andreessen, and podcaster Joe Rogan were resurfacing a 2022 clip of the president-elect discussing his “free speech policy initiative”—an initiative meant to limit the free speech rights of academics and researchers studying disinformation. In it, he promises to “shatter the left-wing censorship regime.” “The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed,” Trump says. “When I am President, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large. There won’t be anything left.” With authoritarian sweeps pitting blue-blooded Americans against these would-be evil researchers and bureaucrats, Trump describes how, “within hours of his inauguration,” he would:
sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as “mis-” or “dis-information”. And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship—directly or indirectly—whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are.
He would order his Department of Justice to “investigate” censorship, and promised to stop funding—including federal student loan programs and entirely unrelated research activities—for universities and nonprofits that engage in any work on disinformation (academic study which, by the way, rarely involves anything resembling "label[ing] speech.” It’s more often about observing how information flows and putting good information—more speech!—out there).
The attacks on our sector continue. Just yesterday, I learned that Kash Patel, Trump's nominee for FBI Director, included me on a "Deep State Government" target list he published in his 2023 book, Government Gangsters. My inclusion is based on the false conspiracy theory that my brief role at DHS was "to monitor and squelch messages and information that the administration doesn't support" and that I am an "actual purveyor of disinformation" who "personally helped spread the false Russia Gate conspiracy." I don't know of any definition of "Deep State" that could include someone whose service in government lasted less than three months.
So let's be clear: the retribution Patel longs for has no basis in reality, and a man this unhinged and untethered from truth has no place in our country's leadership.
The toolkit that Trump described and his allies amplified in the days after the election is not novel; it is one that has been fine-tuned by authoritarians around the world as they attempt to stamp out dissent. And it represents the greatest threat to modern democracy that hardly anyone recognizes.
I started The American Sunlight Project to fight back against precisely these sorts of campaigns. Since launching in late April, we’ve secured the release of crucial Congressional testimony, uncovered a hidden network of Russian bots, and documented the harassment of disinformation researchers—all crucial steps toward amplifying the truth in our fractured information environment.
But staring down a new Trump presidency, the twin challenges of disinformation research and attacks on dissent seem to be growing by the day.
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