The reality was somewhat different. In a matter of months, the fact-checking service had itself become a fountain of conspiracy theories and inflammatory smears, with staff accused of harassing domestic critics of Trump’s decision to strengthen America’s sanctions regime. Dovish American activists were denounced for “lobbying” for the Iranian regime; Georgetown University adjunct professor Ali Vaez was described as “practically a substitute spokesman” for the Iranian foreign ministry; Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post journalist who had been imprisoned and tortured in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison for 544 days, was accused of “spreading regime disinformation”. As the false accusations mounted up, targeting prominent figures at the BBC and Human Rights Watch, an embarrassed State Department finally pulled the Project’s funding in May 2019. 

More than three years later, with concerns about disinformation as feverish as ever, the project’s rise and fall remains a lesson in what can happen when Western governments pour public money into combatting it. Today, the “disinformation wars” can be split into two camps. In one corner, there are those who believe that Russian, Iranian or Chinese online propaganda is not just factually incorrect, but is a new form of dangerous untruth that must be exposed and neutralised by expert inquisitors. In the other, critics of this approach highlight how treating the media as an inquisition or battlefield runs counter to democracy. Indeed, as many journalists have discovered, Western governments often use the spectre of disinformation to monitor domestic critics and push for social-media censorship.

Both sides, however, miss an important point: disinformation is not the unique wonder-weapon of foreign despots. In other countries, Western governments and pro-West partisans are just as willing to put out dishonest and destructive propaganda.

The US military, for instance, has deployed fake social media accounts to push certain messages abroad, just as Russia does. Last year, it was revealed that the Pentagon had used them to spread unverified rumours that Iran was stealing the organs of Afghan refugees. Messages in last year’s Twitter Files also exposed how military officials have pretended to be Arab citizens defending the Saudi invasion of Yemen. For all the freedom-fighting rhetoric in public, the US government is just as willing to deploy dirty tricks in the service of friendly tyrants.

Voters, meanwhile, are largely unaware that their tax money is being used to spread falsehoods and outright slander. In 2019, a scandal erupted when Radio y Televisión Martí, a US state-run broadcaster aimed at audiences in Cuba, ran an antisemitic hit piece on the liberal billionaire George Soros, in which he was described as “a non-practising Jew of flexible morals”. It was the typical sort of conspiracy theory found in Spanish-language anticommunist media, which often traffics in dark fantasies about Left-wing “witchcraft” and the coming dictatorship of “Jews and blacks”. Several Radio y Televisión Martí reporters were fired for the Soros report, and an audit found the station rife with “bad journalism” and one-sided “propagandistic” coverage. 

The latter accusation was, of course, the point. The explicit policy of the US government — outlined in the 1996 Helms-Burton Act — is to pursue regime change in Cuba. Radio y Televisión Martí, which is run by exiled Cuban dissidents, some of whom spent long and traumatic stints in prison there, is supposed to rile up Cubans. Its mistake was to do so against the wrong target.

Similar miscalculations have flared up in the Middle East, too. In 2021, Al-Hurra, an Arabic-language satellite TV channel funded by the US government, reported that the Al-Khoe’i Foundation, a charitable organisation in London that represents a strain of Shia Islam opposed to the Iranian government’s theology, might be “spreading terrorism” on behalf of Tehran. The story was based on a paper by an obscure Israeli think-tank, filled with sloppy logical leaps, factual errors and anti-Shia paranoia. Here, the channel was playing to the crowd: fear-mongering about Iranian conspiracies is a way to win over a Sunni Arab audience that distrusts the United States but despises Iran more. In an attempt to cover itself, the US State Department, which does try to maintain good relations with Shia clergy outside of Iran, was forced to issue a separate statement affirming that “Al-Khoe’i Foundation is a well-regarded international charitable and educational organisation”.

Americans are unaware, by design, that they are funding this propaganda. A piece of post-war legislation called the Smith-Mundt Act was designed to create a firewall between American society and the government’s foreign-facing broadcasters, to avoid the appearance of Soviet-style domestic manipulation. The Smith-Mundt Act also instructs the US government to use “private agencies” for its propaganda “to the maximum extent practicable”. In practice, this means dumping a lot of money into disreputable activist groups such as the Iran Disinformation Project and its counterparts in other countries.

But empowering conspiracy theorists to promote Western causes has never been a wise tactic. Although disinformation can foment popular anger and undermine governments in the short term — goals that Western leaders may back — its powers end there. A movement run by delusional leaders and held together by fantasies cannot effect long-term change.

Consider the Chinese religious movement Falun Gong, which has endured horrific persecution by the Beijing government and has become one of its most vocal opposition factions abroad. As part of a pressure campaign, the Trump administration set aside funding for an app that Falun Gong developed for Chinese citizens to access banned media. There appeared to be little consideration that Falun Gong’s founder preached a belief in shape-shifting aliens and an opposition to interracial marriage. (Falun Gong representative Larry Liu called these beliefs “misinterpretations” and “tangential” to their doctrine in a follow-up email.) The movement’s newspaper, Epoch Times, is a firehose of misinformation about the coronavirus, child sex trafficking and other topics. It’s one thing to support Falun Gong’s right to hold dissident beliefs; it’s another to appoint it as the group responsible for breaking Chinese internet censorship. 

Undeterred, the US government has continued to invest in its massive army of undercover social media accounts around the world. It remains unclear exactly how extensive it is, though a report by the Stanford Internet Observatory last year revealed the kind of content the US government pushes clandestinely. Posters posing as “independent media” plagiarised real news outlets, then added in anti-Russian or anti-Iranian talking points. The network even included a fake journalist, whose picture was a portrait of a Puerto Rican actress photoshopped to look Central Asian.

Elsewhere, some of the pages promoted Iranian nationalism to Iranian audiences, arguing that the Islamic Republic was draining the country’s resources for the sake of foreign client rulers. Others stoked anti-Iranian nationalism in neighbouring countries, claiming Iran was depleting Iraqi water supplies and pumping the streets of Baghdad full of crystal meth.

None of this is to suggest that propaganda can or should be abolished. It has, after all, been a tool of foreign policy and war for centuries. What it does reveal, however, is that the problem of disinformation is not unique to any political system: it is not a matter of democracy vs autocracy. Western governments and politicians will propagandise, as all governments and politicians do. If disinformation really is a threat to Western society, its warrior critics could do worse than start at home.

Last Tuesday a 15-year-school boy, recently named as Ethan Crumbley, allegedly shot and killed four fellow students, injuring seven others. This happened at a high school in suburban Detroit, Michigan. The week before, Darrell Brooks allegedly drove his SUV into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring many more. According to witnesses, he appeared to be intentionally trying to hit people; one of the victims was an eight-year-old boy. At the time of the attack, Brooks was on bail, after being charged with running over the mother of his child in a domestic dispute earlier last month.

Prosecutors in Michigan have levelled one charge of terrorism against Crumbley, in addition to four first-degree murder counts and numerous other charges. No charges of terrorism have been brought against Brooks; he instead faces six counts of first-degree homicide. 

This raises all sorts of questions about the politics of categorising mass-causality violence. While school-rampages often result in multiple deaths and terrorise those who are victimised in them, they are not conventionally classified as terrorism, since the motives of those who carry them out are typically personal. They are not intended to further a political cause or ideology. So it is curious that the authorities in Michigan have levelled a charge of terrorism.

Crumbley’s alleged motives are as yet unclear, although he reportedly left some writings that may shed some light on his thinking. Explaining the terrorism charge to CNN, Karen McDonald, the Oakland county [Michigan] prosecutor, said that Crumbley had set out to kill and injure as many people as possible. “If that’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is,” she said, in the process enlarging the concept of terrorism far beyond its standard meaning of politically-motivated violence against civilians and into the far broader domain of criminal murderousness. McDonald also noted, by way of further explanation, “how terrifying it is to be in close proximity of another student shooting and killing fellow students. I mean, it’s terror”.

Suggested reading

The myth of lone-wolf terrorism

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Brooks’s alleged motives are similarly unclear, although we know that he had advocated for attacks against white people on social media and shared an anti-Semitic meme praising Hitler. We also know that vehicular rammings, unlike high school shootings, are a common modus operandi of terrorists. Scores of ISIS-inspired and directed operatives, for example, have used cars and trucks as weapons of mass-slaughter. So it is seems worth noting that Brooks, who clearly harboured extremist sentiments, and whose alleged victims were all white, has not been given a terrorism charge. Needless to say, Brooks’s alleged actions would have been terrorising to those who were on the receiving end of them.

What is even more curious is the incuriosity of the elite media and extremism experts about the Brooks case. Had he been a white male who had expressed misogynistic views about women it is certain that they would have staged a giant moral panic about the global menace of incels and the far-Right.

But Brooks, who is a registered sex offender and trader in online hate, has attracted little sustained discussion or concern. To be clear: I’m not saying that the Brooks case should occasion a moral panic, or that he be given a terrorism charge. There’s still much that we don’t know about him, his state of mind, motives and indeed mental health. But I do think we should ask questions about the selection bias of the credentialed commentators and experts who command so much of our attention.

As the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari has recently documented, the coverage of the Brooks case by mainstream media outlets has been quite appalling. The Washington Post, in a tweet, described the ramming attack as a “tragedy caused by a SUV”. A CBS national correspondent made reference to “the Wisconsin parade crash”, as if what happened was an unfortunate accident. If this sounded coldly dispassionate and euphemistic in the extreme, it is because it was. What it emphatically wasn’t was an inferno of alarmist online commentary and outrage about the perpetrator’s vile beliefs.

The Michigan attack, by contrast, has provoked a very different kind of commentary and critical probing. Thomas Renard, director of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague, tweeted: “This case raises so many questions: What is terrorism? Does terrorism offence bring any added value in such case? Could it be counter productive? Should we use CT [counter-terrorism] toolbox more often, to deal with more forms of extremism, or not? Pros and Cons?”

Renard is right: the Michigan school shooting does raise many questions, one of which is why extremism scholars like Renard had nothing to say about Brooks’s alleged vehicular ramming attack and how that case might raise questions about terrorism and ideologically motivated violence more broadly.

To be fair to Renard and my fellow extremism researchers, perhaps they just hadn’t clocked the news about the Waukesha attack, especially given that it had attracted relatively little media attention. Or perhaps they had heard about it, but were apt to ignore it because Brooks wasn’t charged with terrorism.

Suggested reading

Why Prevent will never work

By Tom Chivers

But neither explanation holds up to scrutiny. Many terrorism experts and extremism researchers are very online. Some of these people, evidently, are never not online. It’s hard to think that the Waukesha attack would have escaped their notice.

There’s also a whole cottage industry of counter-extremist entrepreneurs which thrives on churning out report after report on the wider online “eco-systems” of misogynistic hate and racialised invective. So it’s odd that Brooks’s violent rhetoric, and past violence against women, didn’t raise any eyebrows among a group of researchers who are nothing if not hyper-vigilant when it comes to spotting signs of hate.

I suspect other and deeper imperatives and incentives are at work. One is to do with what the American sociologist Erving Goffman called “impression management”, while the other relates to the politics of grift. The triumph of identity politics, and the fear of running afoul of the puritanical scolds who police it, has meant that whenever an act of mass-casualty violence has been perpetrated by a white male — that reviled figure of opprobrium in the cosmology of the what Wesley Yang terms the “successor ideology” — it is tempting to vigorously call it out and to account. The act of doing so has become a familiar ritual in public life, the purpose of which is to communicate one’s virtue.

It is to pronounce, in effect, “I really care about the evil of systemic racism”. In a Durkheimian sense, it also allows people to bond with other morally upstanding people, and in a way that is emotionally seductive.

The temptation to call out or draw attention to the mass-casualty violence of the far-Right is even stronger for extremism researchers, since many have made decent careers out of researching and writing about jihadist groups and violence. This makes them vulnerable to the charge of islamophobia and racism, or both, and perhaps even gives them a bad conscience. From the perspective of their Left-leaning critics, these researchers are guilty of focusing disproportionately on the jihadist threat or perpetuating dangerous “essentialist” tropes about Islam and Muslims.

Nobody wants to be accused of Islamophobia or racism, and one way of forestalling or neutralising that accusation is to constantly amplify the threat of the far-Right. Of course, extremism researchers would deny that they’re in the business of impression management, of trying to foster a righteous impression before others. And if they’re sounding alarmist about the far-Right threat, this is because the threat is so goddamn alarming that it keeps them awake at night.

Another reason why extremism researchers are now so transfixed on the far-Right threat is because it’s unquestionably good for business. It’s where all the grant money is. You certainly won’t receive state or private funding by saying that the QAnon threat is exaggerated or that incels are more dangerous to themselves than to others. And no publisher is going to offer a lucrative book deal for How Terrorism is Overblown.

More from this author

The theatre of terror

By Simon Cottee

This isn’t just an American pathology. Here in Britain two recent acts of lethal violence engendered two very different responses. One was a killing spree by a 22-year-old man called Jake Davison. In just 12 minutes he killed his mother in the house they shared and then went on to shoot to death four others, before turning his weapon on himself. Devon and Cornwall Police initially ruled out terrorism as a motive, although it was known that Davison had visited incel online forums and was a disgruntled virgin. This prompted a slew of commentary on how Davison was a terrorist, and how incels were far-Right extremists. The Guardian ran a story titled, “Should the Plymouth shootings be declared an act of terror?” Quite why the headline-writer thought it necessary to phrase the headline as a question was unclear, since the whole substance of the piece sought to argue that there was little doubt that it should be declared an act of terror.

Then, in October, Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old British-Somali man, allegedly stabbed to death the Conservative MP David Amess. The police soon declared this a terrorist incident, and had referred to “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. Yet the main focus of the media response was not on the political motives of the perpetrator, but rather the scourge of online hate aimed at British politicians more generally, as if somehow the dark corners of the internet had murdered Amess.

It gets boring to keep pointing out the double-standard here, which is that progressives are liable to deny or sanitise the political violence of those with whom they are in sympathy (pre-eminently minorities), while amplifying the political violence of their enemies (pre-eminently the running dogs of white, heteronormative patriarchy). Of course, the Right is also prone to a similar double-standard, pointing out the mental health problems of far-Right attackers while prioritising the role of militant religiosity in jihadi attacks. But it’s imperative for terrorism experts and extremism researchers to resist this sort of tribal temptation.

What is terrorism and who is a terrorist? A lot of ink has been wasted in trying to answer this, but it’s really not that complicated. Terrorism, as the Australian philosopher Tony Coady has usefully defined it, is “the organised use of violence to attack non-combatants (i.e. civilians) or their property for political purposes”. Correspondingly, a terrorist is someone who commits this kind of violence.

The trouble with terrorism, as a concept, relates not to its core meaning, but to its practical application. Was the Michigan school-shooter a terrorist? Was Darrell Brooks? The honest answer to both questions is that it’s still too early to tell — and that both cases are complex. Yet it’s striking that only one of those questions is being publicly asked right now, and it’s not the second one.

The case of Britain’s youngest ever terror offender is profoundly disturbing, reigniting serious concerns over young people and their vulnerabilities to radicalisation. But it also provides us with an opportunity to reflect on how we talk about terrorism, particularly in the highly politicised context of today’s post-Trump world.

In a saner time, I suspect we would hesitate to call a 16-year-old who has not actually committed any acts of political violence a terrorist at all. The boy in question was convicted under the “encouragement” and “possession” instruments in British terrorism legislation (two and ten counts respectively).As serious as this is, it isn’t terrorism as we conventionally understand it. It isn’t, for example, the same as carrying out a suicide bombing at a pop concert, or beheading a school teacher.

Suggested article

Why is the Anglo media portraying France as the villain?

By Liam Duffy

But even if one accepts that possessing bomb-making manuals and sharing violently hateful messages on WhatsApp is terrorism, one would surely hesitate to call a disturbed and misguided 16-year-old who didn’t realise he had recruited an undercover police officer a “terrorist mastermind”. My colleague Keith Hayward, a professor of criminology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, has a word for this species of rhetorical slippage: adultification – the application of adult categories to those who are not yet adults. (Interestingly, the term is commonly used by sociologists to describe the racial bias against black schoolgirls in America, where they are unfairly viewed as more mature and “less innocent” than their white counterparts.)

The sensationalisation of terrorism is, of course, nothing new. But the coverage of Britain’s youngest “terror teen” intimates at a decisive shift in reportorial protocols around terrorism. This shift doesn’t reflect any real changes in the behaviour and threat level of terrorists, but is instead a direct consequence of the ever-tightening choke-hold of progressive taboos around race and Islam in contemporary western societies.

These taboos demand that we talk about terrorism in two distinct ways: on the one hand, we catastrophise its far-right variant, ramping up the agency and vileness of its perpetrators; while on the other, we infantilise its jihadi incarnation, playing down the agency of its instigators and forbidding any discussion of the religious motivations behind their violence.

As part of this juggling act, we are required to pretend that far-Right terrorism in America is far more problematic than jihadi extremism (this isn’t to deny the significant recent uptick in lethal far-right terrorism in America). We are also asked to believe that while the ideology of the far-right is a primary driver of terrorism worldwide, the ideology of violent jihadism and its links to fringe interpretations of the Islamic faith has little or nothing to do with jihadi violence and conflict. This hypocrisy amounts to “ideology for thee but not for me”, as Graeme Wood has acidly put it.

Suggested article

Stop trying to explain mass shootings

By Tom Chivers

Take, by way of illustration, the case of the three East London schoolgirls who left Britain in February 2015 to join ISIS in Syria. The response that followed was hysterical in many ways, but the girls and their families were given a mostly fair and lenient hearing. The consensus was that the girls — the youngest of whom, Shamima Begum, was 15 — were victims who had been “groomed” by manipulative male online recruiters and bewitched by dangerously seductive ISIS propaganda.

For example, Sara Khan, the current head of the UK’s Commission for Countering Extremism, wrote that “just like child abusers groom their victims online and persuade them to leave their homes and meet them, male jihadists contact women through social media and online chatrooms, and build trust with them over time”. That consensus, however, was wrong. The real-life and online peer-groups in which they were radicalised were strictly women-only; the so-called online “groomers” were in fact other ISIS-supporting women. And, of course, the vast majority of the pro-ISIS British girls were on the verge of womanhood, making the comparison to sexual grooming somewhat overblown. They may have been young, but it seems misguided to deny them any sense of agency.

Yet even when, aged 19, Begum surfaced in northern Syria and boasted to a reporter that seeing a severed head in a bin didn’t really faze her — she told another that the Manchester Arena suicide bombing was justified — many liberals remained firmly in her corner, insisting that she was still a victim of grooming, and that she should be given a second chance.

Suggested article

Is Prevent producing terrorists?

By Mike Martin

This urge is noticeably less strong among progressives when it comes to far-Right terrorists. And I suspect this points to a politicisation of terrorism that makes it almost impossible to talk about it in a coherent and serious way.

Traditionally, the liberal-left consensus on terrorism was founded on three principles. The first concerned the fundamental illegitimacy of the word itself; it was, they said, simply a label used by the powerful to demonise and control the weak. It was a term and tool of repression, a way of legitimising the ever-widening net of social control against dissidents and rebels with a righteous cause.

The second part was concerned with the legitimacy of terrorism itself and the moral standing of the terrorist. While some — notably Leon Trotsky and Frantz Fanon — sought to brazenly justify “red terror” as a weapon of the last resort in times of asymmetrical conflict, others were more equivocal, condemning the murder of innocents while at the same time making sure to situate such atrocities into a wider context that made it morally understandable (“This is wrong, but…”). From this perspective, the terrorist was not a monster, but instead a misguided soul who was “pushed” or “driven” to commit atrocious deeds. And whatever else he was, he was essentially forgivable; he was still one of us.

This is connected to a third and final aspect of this liberal-left consensus, which relates to the way that society should respond to acts of political violence. It took the form of the following cautionary wisdom: do not over-react to terrorism. Doing so not only tramples on human rights and sets in place a dangerous precedent for further rights-infringements, but it also risks alienating and further radicalising people, provoking a lethal “blowback”.

Much of this worldview remains in place on the liberal-left, but in recent years it has been brought into conflict with the emergence of a second, contradictory consensus. According to this new paradigm, there is actually nothing wrong with the label “terrorism”; what’s wrong is that it’s selectively applied to Muslims and other minority groups and not applied nearly enough to the white majority.

Moreover, the “real” terrorists — whether they’re storming the US Capitol or hiding on neo-Nazi online forums — really are monsters and deserve not an ounce of forgiveness. Indeed, they should be purged from the social order. And anyone who tries to contextualise or understand, still less give a platform to, these terrorists should be roundly condemned.

But the problem for liberal-leftists is that this consensus cannot co-exist with the other one. You can’t implore forgiveness for Shamima Begum while at the same time scream for the metaphorical lynching of the Capitol rioters.

Suggested article

The War on Terror returns home

By Will Lloyd

None of this would be much of a problem if the pathologies and contortions of the liberal-left’s terrorism discourse simply remained there, but since this political tribe is now ascendant in elite institutions in America and parts of Europe, it’s becoming a problem for the rest of us. Indeed, so culturally prevalent and deep are the progressive taboos around race and Islam in the West that it has become difficult to talk about terrorism in a sane and rational way. Even traditional centres of power — like the police and civil service — are seemingly incapable of talking plainly about the threats we face. Last summer, for instance, the Met Police considered dropping the term “Islamist” when describing terror attacks carried out by jihadists.

Meanwhile, anyone who tries to understand the root causes of far-Right rancour is dismissed as a rank defender of the far-Right. The investigative journalist Naama Kates, for example, has told me that she regularly receives censure from so-called progressives for giving a platform to misogynistic “involuntary celibates” on her superb Incel podcast; Kates’s offence is that she uses a methodology called empathy to better understand incels.

Moreover, if you’re not Muslim and study or report on jihadist violence, you run the risk of being accused of Islamophobia. Even Thomas Hegghammer, one of the world’s leading experts on jihadism, has recently been accused of perpetuating “stale and harmful notions of Muslim essentialism” — all because his focus on the conservative, non-violent and strongly religious cultural practices of otherwise violent Muslim militants is regarded as perpetuating a dangerous conflation between conservative Muslims and jihadists. Which is a bit like saying that if a person points out that Tommy Robinson eats dirty fry-ups, they are smearing all fry-up-eating Brits with the taint of white supremacy.

Plainly, this is nonsense. But it is also dangerous nonsense. The implication is that any reference to the Islamic religiosity of jihadists is off-limits. And the result, as we can see, is the creation of a schizoid terrorism discourse that leaves us dangerously ill-equipped to face common threats to peace and security.

We desperately need to better understand why and how people — from all backgrounds and faiths and ethnicities — embrace ideologies that command and license them to kill other people for political ends. And we must try to do so with an open mind and in a spirit of curious inquiry, accepting our findings wherever they lead. To abdicate this responsibility from fear of offending the shallow pieties of what John McWhorter calls “the elect” is not only cowardly, but ultimately dangerous, given the very real threats that menace us.