The MAGA Right Is Only Pretending to Be Censored

F or nearly a year and a half, the Trump administration prepared its case.

Political appointees inside the State Department combed through old files and databases.

Civil servants received notice that their personal emails would be examined.

Darren Beattie—the founder of a far-right conspiracist website, then the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy—sent out a request for files on anyone who had communicated with or written about the Global Engagement Center, a now-dissolved agency that once worked to expose propaganda campaigns by Russia, China, Iran, and other countries around the world. [ Read: The white nationalist in charge of Trump’s public diplomacy ] The request, seen last year by the MIT Technology Review , was far-reaching.

Beattie was seeking information on Bill Gates; the commentator Bill Kristol; Chris Krebs, a former U.S. cybersecurity official; a German government minister; the analyst Renée DiResta, formerly at Stanford University, as well as others associated with a research project called the Election Integrity Partnership; and, as it happens, me.

This unprecedented investigation was meant to expose the Biden administration’s “censorship-industrial complex,” a shadowy network allegedly dedicated to the mass suppression of American free speech.

Since 2020, internet trolls have accused Biden-administration officials, social-media companies, and university researchers of weaving a nefarious plot to censor conservatives.

Since 2025, MAGA ideologues have been using this alleged plot as an excuse to dismantle government programs, stifle research, intimidate American citizens, and even distort American foreign policy.

And yet for the past year and half, neither Beattie nor anyone else has actually managed to prove that the plot ever existed.

Like a soap bubble that vanishes with the touch of a hand, the “censorship-industrial complex” belongs to that mystical category of things that disappear when you examine them too closely.

The failure to produce evidence is not for lack of trying.

During the Biden administration, MAGA allies and politicians filed multiple lawsuits with the goal of exposing alleged censorship.

None has done so.

One of them, brought by the Missouri attorney general, made it all the way to the Supreme Court before justices asked for underlying evidence that the government had censored anyone.