With an election next week where the White House sees foreign meddling everywhere, it’s launched a flagrant attack against freedom of speech on supposed “national security” grounds.
Asked in a little-noticed Tuesday interview about what the government could do about foreign influence operations on social media like TikTok, White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka’s reply was shockingly frank:
“We have that knee-jerk: ‘Oh, First Amendment, don’t do anything’ — but there are things we have to do if there’s a threat to national security that actually comports with the U.S. Constitution.”
When the White House’s point man on counterterrorism calls First Amendment concerns “knee-jerk,” that’s a pretty good sign that freedom of speech isn’t a top priority.
Gorka, as usual, is the car alarm in the coal mine, saying what the rest of the White House is thinking but discreet enough to keep to itself. His comments are an unusually blunt admission about what the federal government’s sprawling machine for combatting “foreign influence” is actually about: censorship.
Officially, its job is countering Russian, Chinese, and Iranian operations that might influence how Americans vote. The dirty secret is that the job runs straight through the First Amendment — if not the letter of the law, certainly the spirit.
So who’s the threat, in Gorka’s mind? Tucker Carlson, the conservative commentator who was once a MAGA enthusiast and ally of the president’s, has emerged as a critic over the Iran war — an issue sure to be on voters’ minds next week. Gorka says the government has to do something “whenever he posts a new anti-American interview,” singling out his criticisms of the Iran war specifically.
“Whether it’s any of his recent rants about, you know, the justified war against the Islamo-fascist regime in Iran — watch the speed with which posts like that are accelerated in ways that human beings can’t …?” Gorka continued.
As he goes on to say, many online criticisms of the administration are “not organic,” but rather foreign influence operations aimed at “the duly elected administration” — a telling invocation of elections.
Per Gorka:
“There are countries in whose interest it is to amplify artificially those voices that undermine the duly elected administration and commander-in-chief of the United States … Whether it’s China, whether it’s Iran, whether it’s Russia, they want to see more of this. It’s not organic, so they have to artificially accelerate it.”
You’ll notice he isn’t accusing Carlson of taking orders from Tehran, Moscow, or Beijing — which is actually illegal. His argument is subtler and more dangerous: because foreign governments might boost what Carlson says, what Carlson says becomes a national security matter. By that standard, any American critic of the war, or of the president, whose posts go viral is potentially fair game for the counter-foreign-influence apparatus. And fair game means subject to being shut down; or put another way, censored.
Trump’s allies have been building this narrative for months, about criticisms of the Iran war.
In March, Trump confidante Laura Loomer accused Carlson of trying to sabotage Republicans in the midterms. Before that, she had urged then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to go after him as a “national security threat.”
In April, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, told CNBC: “The type of misinformation that he’s [Carlson] putting out on a daily basis is not only wrong, but frankly they’re dangerous.”
Then in May, Trump went further and branded critical war coverage as literal treason. “When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement,” he posted. “They are aiding and abetting the enemy!”
Notice how quickly the government’s war on foreign influence blows back on Americans. I’ve been warning about it all week in my series on the election and the security apparatus around it: the military’s Task Force Raider, the Justice Department’s Doomsday planning, and the National Guard’s quiet election mission. The government gets away with a lot by saying foreign, foreign, foreign. But you can’t study influence without studying who is supposedly being influenced. And in this case, that’s Americans.
None of this is to say foreign influence operations aren’t real. Of course they are. But so are corporate influence operations (called “marketing”). Companies spend fortunes trying to get Americans to buy what they’re selling, and they routinely flop. Think Apple’s VR headset or Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse. And those companies understand Americans far better, and are far more competent, than, say, some Russian military intelligence unit. If Silicon Valley’s brightest can’t make people want to buy something, why assume Putin’s drunk nepo hire (or whoever) can turn them against a war?
Expect to hear a lot more about foreign meddling if the elections don’t go Trump’s way, which polling suggests is likely. How’s that for a Halloween horror show?
This is Part 5 of my series on the national security state and the 2026 midterms. Read Part 1: Military Hacking and the Election; Part 2: Feds Prep for Election “Doomsday” Scenario; Part 3: El-Sayed Is National Security Threat, Gov’t Says; and Part 4: National Guard Mobilizes for Election.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
Keep up the great reporting, Ken! The First Amendment, and we, the people, need you!