by Richard Balzano
Calla Walsh, Jackson Hinkle and Christopher Helali have been accused of disinformation and propaganda. They are nontraditional journalists, certainly. They do not spend their days interviewing retired generals for mainstream outlets about why this week’s bombing campaign is regrettable but necessary, and they don’t wait until truth commissions to be on the right side of history. Instead, they travel to countries the United States considers enemies, talk to people Americans are told to hate and fear, and report perspectives that rarely penetrate our Western media echo chamber. The trio were among the remarkably few Western media figures who attended the funeral procession for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Funny thing about journalism: sometimes it’s more than transcribing State Department talking points; sometimes it requires going places and observing first hand.
For that, Congressman Randy Fine and six Republican colleagues have called them “traitors and terrorists” and asked the Justice Department to investigate whether their journalism amounts to material support for terrorism. Because that’s how a democracy works, apparently: a free and fair press is welcome to report whatever it wants, so long as the State Department agrees.
Who are the accused? Walsh is a few clicks left of the Democratic Socialists of America with whom she was formerly affiliated, and she has reported extensively on recent conflict in the Middle East. Hinkle is a co-founder of the American Communist Party whose enormous online following and “MAGA Communist” politics have made him a particularly strange creature in American media. Helali, meanwhile, has local ties. He attended graduate school at Dartmouth College, and he taught high school in Hanover, NH. He ran for Vermont’s U.S. House seat in 2020 as a communist, winning 1 percent of the vote, and he was subsequently elected High Bailiff of Orange County, VT.
The trio weren’t alone. Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone and persistent critic of American foreign policy, was also in Iran to cover the procession. Blumenthal was curiously absent from Fine’s list, and even conservative pundit Laura Loomer questioned his omission, but Blumenthal received a special homecoming that many left-leaning journalists now receive: Customs and Border Protection detained him for roughly two hours and seized two of his phones.
So what was the crime? All three are outspoken critics of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Walsh praised Khamenei as the world’s “greatest anti-imperialist leader.” Helali, who is of partial Iranian descent, expressed solidarity with Iran. Hinkle, less subtly, participated in chants of “Down with U.S.A.” These are political statements—different political statements, at that, and allegedly protected speech.
The July 17th congressional letter says the event was organized and orchestrated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the United States designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2019. The letter alleges that the Americans’ participation was “in service of the IRGC.” That distinction matters. Reporting favorably about an organization and working for it are not the same thing—unless Washington gets to decide that journalism becomes terrorism whenever the journalist takes the wrong side.
Enter Congressman Randy Fine (R-Florida), the Peter Griffin of supporting Israel. The Florida Republican’s devotion is sufficiently enthusiastic that, as a state legislator, he invoked Florida’s anti-BDS law against singer Lorde after she canceled a concert in Tel Aviv and called the boycott movement an “antisemitic, terrorist movement.” There exists an infamous video of Fine wandering around the Florida House pressing voting buttons at other legislators’ desks, allegedly regarding legislation outlawing boycotts of Israel. The footage is real and Fine acknowledged being the man in it; the specific claim that it captured the anti-BDS vote, however, has not been independently established. Given the leniency around violating the Leahy Laws when it comes to supporting Israel, we can presume there would not be consequences for Fine’s actions.
Fine’s feelings about the Iran delegation require considerably less interpretation: “This is treason,” he wrote about Helali. “Arrest this scumbag the second he lands back in America.”
Fine then joined Max Miller, Randy Weber, Claudia Tenney, Derrick Van Orden, Keith Self and Addison McDowell in sending their letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “The only thing American about these people are their passports,” they wrote. “They are traitors and terrorists that must be held accountable.” The lawmakers suggested the three be denied re-entry to the United States and asked the administration to investigate whether their participation constituted material support for terrorism.
Charging journalists critical of U.S. policy with material support for terrorism could bring Richard Nixon to orgasm from beyond the grave, but the First Amendment poses an obstacle. Fine’s letter invokes Holder v Humanitarian Law Project, the 2010 Supreme Court case upholding restrictions on certain coordinated activities performed with or under the direction of designated terrorist organizations. The operative word is “coordinated.” The federal material-support statute does not make independent advocacy a terrorist offense merely because that advocacy benefits a foreign terrorist organization, but it specifically addresses services performed “to, under the direction of, or in coordination with” one. Fine’s letter simply declares that “there is no question” the journalists’ activities were in service of the IRGC. Yet whether there was actual coordination is precisely the question upon which the criminal accusation depends.
“Treason” is narrower still. The Constitution deliberately restricts the act to levying war against the United States or adhering to its enemies, giving them aid and comfort. The Framers knew what governments tended to do with the word “traitor.”
The most disturbing part of the letter is what its authors offer as evidence. Walsh, they complain, produces content for Iranian television. Hinkle and Helali, on the other hand, are guilty of appearing on Russian and Chinese outlets to “promote anti-American and anti-Western narratives.”
Read that again—their journalism is being offered as evidence against them, and this is where the implications become considerably larger than three communist journalists at an Iranian funeral. Our corporate media already gives Americans an astonishingly narrow spectrum of acceptable opinion about American empire. Washington’s adversaries are “dictators,” its friends are “allies,” its military interventions are “operations” at worst and “self-defense” at best, and its official pronouncements are reported with a credulity unavailable to anyone on the receiving end of American bombs.
Independent journalists exist precisely to break that consensus. Walsh, Hinkle, Helali and Blumenthal went somewhere most Western journalists didn’t. They saw something Americans otherwise would not have seen. They reported from a perspective our political establishment despises, and Randy Fine is perfectly free to despise it; but he does not get to transform criticism of American foreign policy into terrorism and journalism into treason. Orwell called that sort of thing thoughtcrime; apparently in 2026 we call it “congressional oversight.”
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Richard M. Balzano is an historian and political analyst peddling truths at several institutions of higher learning, quietly devoted to the art of sedition and comfortably resigned to the peripheral left.