by Richard M. Balzano
State Department policy planners, White House speechwriters, and much of Congress enjoy an unusual workplace protection: federal buildings are equipped with an Irony Suppression System, referred to internally as the Irony Dome. OSHA has never acknowledged the hazard, but whatever they’re pumping through federal ventilation systems has rendered government officials clinically incapable of detecting irony. Thus, the U.S. lectures the world on democracy and press freedom, condemning censorship abroad while normalizing it at home, sanitized by national security-speak, albeit of an increasingly low-IQ nature. The targets are hardly random: journalists challenging American and Israeli foreign policy repeatedly encounter this machinery. Irony be damned.
Independent media has a target on its back right now, and recently BreakThrough News is in the crosshairs. The Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed the outlet in July, demanding internal communications and financial records as part of an investigation into alleged foreign influence. BreakThrough has not been charged with a crime. The outlet says its only “crime has been to tell the truth—by covering the activities of the Palestine solidarity movement, unmasking the truth of ICE’s terror in our streets, and exposing Washington’s crimes around the world, from Cuba to the Congo.” Naturally, the Committee describes BreakThrough as part of a “CCP-linked” network, framing the subpoena as part of its investigation into foreign-linked funding of tax-exempt organizations. Congressional oversight of foreign influence has apparently reached the “let us read your diary” stage. BreakThrough calls it what it is: intimidation. The legal fees, however, could bury them.
BreakThrough is one of many left-leaning outlets receiving pressure and harassment. After covering the Ayatollah’s funeral in Iran, Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal was detained and interrogated at Dulles, where agents seized his phones. This has become habit: in February 2025, Blumenthal was detained there and questioned about his political associations and journalism. The pattern extends to Blumenthal’s colleagues. In 2022, Ukrainian intelligence enlisted the FBI to pressure Twitter to remove unfriendly journalists’ accounts for allegedly spreading propaganda, including journalist Aaron Maté. Twitter balked at the inclusion of American and Canadian journalists, but the effort was made. Anti-imperialist MintPress News, whose Senior Staff Writer Alan MacLeod writes extensively on Western media bias against the global left, revealed PayPal and GoFundMe banned the outlet, while Indiegogo canceled a fundraiser and withheld $51,000 raised by readers. MintPress alleges coordination involving pro-Israel interests and intelligence agencies—the shoe fits. Congressman Randy Fine is leading a crusade against progressive journalists Christopher Helali, Jackson Hinkle, and Calla Walsh after they attended the Ayatollah’s funeral in Iran. Fine and other lawmakers have pushed federal authorities to prosecute them, transforming political speech and journalism into questions of criminality, national security, and “treason.”
Challenges to American foreign policy have long been converted into questions of national security, but the sophistication of the sales pitch has declined under the current regime. The old witch-hunters limited themselves to espionage allegations and prosecuting the leaking of classified materials which, when published, is called journalism. Their successors increasingly skip the evidentiary formalities and reach straight for treason and foreign allegiance. The latter, it should be noted, is not a crime and does not constitute the former, for if it did every dual Israeli citizen on the Hill would meet a firing squad. Whether they believe their accusations, or merely believe their audience will, is a distinction without much comfort.
The current administration has dispensed with much of the pretense that any coherent national-security rationale is required. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin imposed new limits on foreign-journalist visas in the name of the government’s ability to “screen, vet, and monitor” them. It should be noted that Mullin posted a video in April 2025 suggesting that reporters might write fewer unfavorable stories if disputes with them could still be settled with lethal violence; recounting the 1890 shooting of former congressman William Taulbee by reporter Charles Kincaid, “Now, there’s a lot we could say about reporters and the stories they write, but I bet they would write a lot less false stories—as President Trump says, ‘fake news’—if we could still handle our differences that way.” According to U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, in 2026 alone there have been more than 160 documented assaults on journalists, 43 arrests or criminal charges, 20 subpoenas or legal orders, seven equipment searches or seizures, two leak cases, and 17 “chilling statements” from public officials. When reporting revealed classified details about Iran downing a U.S. fighter jet, Trump was more direct: “National security—give it up or go to jail.” With more poise, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche endorsed subpoenaing reporters to expose their sources, while the Pentagon and DOJ created a joint task force to accelerate media-leak investigations. The legal teams of major outlets like the New York Times may be equipped to hold the line; independent journalists with considerably leaner pockets could fold under similar pressures.
The vulgarity may be distinctly Trumpian, but the machinery that censors leftist journalists is a bipartisan endeavor. In 2020, imperialist critic Abby Martin lost a speaking engagement at Georgia Southern University after refusing to sign a state-mandated pledge not to boycott Israel, a requirement of all state contractors written into law. In 2018, U.S. sanctions blocked TeleSUR from funding Martin’s anti-imperialist show, “The Empire Files,” forcing it off the air. In 2022, Lee Camp was deplatformed across multiple fronts: his anti-war Redacted Tonight was canceled after eight years amid U.S. sanctions on “RT,” YouTube blocked its archive, and Spotify removed his “Moment of Clarity” podcast. Camp calls it “mass censorship on a grand scale.” Liberals—not to be mistaken for leftists—are more susceptible to Democratic administrations’ auto-da-fés, and will enthusiastically embrace, intellectually launder, or quietly tolerate censorship and imperialism when their team dresses it in the colonial camouflage of sober language and uplifting rhetoric, tapping the deeply ingrained belief in paternalistic Western cultural superiority they refuse to decolonize.
These journalists sit directly in those crosshairs for exposing the crimes of the American empire and those of its allies and proxies. BreakThrough now finds itself caught inside precisely that machinery: a newsroom’s private communications demanded under the language of foreign influence and national security. “I’m an agent of reality and an agent of the truth,” BreakThrough’s Rania Khalek responded. “I’m not an agent of some foreign power.” Palestine, Iran, Ukraine and Cuba recur throughout these cases for a reason: the journalists under scrutiny keep exposing the consequences of American foreign policy and the conduct of its allies and proxies. Censorship, then, must be viewed as an instrument of foreign policy, the targets of which are not foreign combatants, but Western journalists challenging their own governments’ conduct abroad.
Whether the subpoena succeeds misses the point. The investigation itself forces independent journalists to answer to the state and expose the anatomy of their operations. That is the warning: censorship as foreign policy does not have to silence the journalist outright. It can simply bleed the newsroom dry and make the truth impossible to sustain. Perhaps the current administration is adopting the Blackstonian conception of press freedom: you are free to publish what you please; the state now reserves the right to make you regret it.
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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.