The U.S. government is waging an illegal, congressionally unauthorized war on Iran. Thirteen American soldiers are formally confirmed dead at the time of writing. Over $11 billion of your money has been spent in three weeks. And the primary concern of senior administration officials is that television stations are using the wrong headlines.
On March 13, Pete Hegseth—the former Fox News host who renamed the Defense Department and whose theology holds that God is personally invested in U.S. airpower over Tehran—stood in front of the Pentagon press corps and delivered a media workshop. A headline reading “Mideast War Intensifies” was not acceptable, he explained. He had a better suggestion: “Iran Increasingly Desperate.” A “patriotic press” would understand the difference. The next day, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr — an author of Project 2025, appointed by Donald Trump specifically for this work — posted a warning to broadcasters that those running “hoaxes and news distortions” should “correct course before their license renewals come up.” Trump endorsed it on Truth Social, calling the networks “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression called Carr’s warning exactly what it was: “authoritarian.”
None of this is surprising. And that is precisely the problem—not the Trump administration specifically, but the degree to which the infrastructure for state control of information is being normalized, codified, and institutionalized across governments that could not agree on the time of day. Trump’s press war is the visible part. What lies beneath it is a Western-wide architecture of information control that will outlast this administration and every one that follows it.
The harder instrument at the White House’s disposal is NSPM-7, the National Security Presidential Memorandum Trump signed on September 25, 2025, titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” It tasked FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces with investigating and disrupting organizations engaged in what the administration classifies as political violence and intimidation. It directed the Treasury Department and IRS to trace and freeze financial networks supporting those organizations. On its face: counterterrorism. In its text: a different matter.
NSPM-7 specifically identifies ideological positions—”anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” opposition to what it calls “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality”—as having animated the political violence it seeks to counter. Attorneys at Arnold & Porter noted that the memorandum deploys post-9/11 counterterrorism tools—tools with no federal crime of “domestic terrorism” attached to them—against a category of organizations defined substantially by their beliefs. The Brennan Center found the memo’s reach extended to “labor organizers, socialists, many libertarians, those who criticize Christianity, pro-immigration groups” and essentially anyone the administration considers insufficiently American. The ACLU called it an effort “to investigate and intimidate his critics.” Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA) called it “one of his most dangerous power grabs yet.” The NYCLU was more precise: NSPM-7 could make “First Amendment protected speech the basis for beginning law enforcement investigations.”
Carr targets the newsrooms. NSPM-7 targets the civil society—the donors, the nonprofits, the advocacy organizations—that sustains independent journalism and challenges official narratives. They are not separate instruments. They are a pincer.
Here is what American commentary on Trump’s media wars consistently omits: the formal institutional development of information control as a military and security doctrine has been underway in Western institutions for years, and it has nothing to do with Trump.
NATO’s Allied Command Transformation—the alliance’s concept development body, headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia—has been building what it formally designates the Cognitive Warfare Exploratory Concept since 2020. The concept originated in an ACT-commissioned study by François du Cluzel, a former French military officer, which proposed that the human brain constitutes NATO’s “sixth domain of operations”—alongside land, sea, air, space, and cyber. The study’s framing was explicit: “[T]he brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century.” NATO ACT’s published definition of cognitive warfare is “an unconventional form of warfare that uses cyber tools to alter enemy cognitive processes, exploit mental biases or reflexive thinking, provoke thought distortions, influence decision-making and hinder actions.” Its stated aim, in the alliance’s own words, includes “proactively shaping the information environment.”
NATO’s cognitive warfare programme is framed as defensive—protecting member-state populations from adversary manipulation, primarily Russia and China. That framing is not dishonest; Russian information operations are real and have caused genuine damage to democratic processes. But a parliamentary question raised in the European Parliament in 2022 identified the structural problem that the doctrine does not resolve: the tools for protecting a population from cognitive manipulation are identical to the tools for conducting it. A military concept built around “shaping the information environment” and exploiting cognitive biases does not come with a switch that limits its use to foreign adversaries. Academic analysis published in Frontiers confirmed that the final cognitive warfare doctrine was expected to be integrated into official NATO doctrine by late 2024. The alliance of thirty-two governments is now formally in the business of cognitive operations, with a doctrine that will be available to every administration that follows, in every member state, indefinitely.
This is a significant development. It has received almost no public attention commensurate with its implications.
On May 20, 2025, the European Union did something that would have been treated as a scandal in any previous decade of European politics. The EU Council adopted Council Decision CFSP 2025/966, the seventeenth package of sanctions against Russia’s “destabilising activities.” Among the twenty-one individuals added to the list—subject to asset freezes, funding prohibitions, and potential travel bans—were two German citizens: Thomas Röper, who runs the blog Anti-Spiegel, and Alina Lipp, who operates the YouTube channel Neues aus Russland. Both are bloggers and journalists. Both hold German citizenship. Both were sanctioned by an unelected Council body, under a proposal signed by High Representative Kaja Kallas, without judicial review, for content the EU determined was aligned with Russian state interests.
This is worth sitting with. The European Union, which regularly issues statements about press freedom in Hungary and Turkey, quietly sanctioned two of its own citizens for journalism—without a trial, without a judge, without any of the procedural protections that European legal traditions supposedly guarantee. The legal framework that enabled this—the parent Decision 2024/2643—allows listing of anyone “responsible for, supporting, or involved in” actions that “undermine or threaten democracy, the rule of law, stability or security in the Union.” The definition is broad by design. Legal scholars including Nico Krisch have noted that absent transparent evidentiary standards, the criteria can reach virtually any dissident voice that institutional authorities decide is harmful.
Jim Bovard noted earlier this year that the German government’s approach to speech is “freedom of speech except for ideas that politicians and government contractors and nonprofit activists don’t like.” CFSP 2025/966 is what that approach looks like when it is formalised into EU foreign policy law and equipped with financial weapons.
The EU’s broader framework for managing information is built around what the European External Action Service calls Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI). Academic researchers publishing in Media and Communication in 2025 documented how the EEAS deliberately chose “FIMI” over “disinformation” precisely because the FIMI concept is “versatile enough to be applied to any narrative perceived as harmful.” The shift from content-based to behaviour-based classification matters. FIMI is defined not by the falseness of what is said but by its “manipulative” character, a determination left to the classifying authority. When the European External Action Service is the classifying authority, the European External Action Service decides what counts as manipulation.
The EU also granted itself, under CFSP 2025/963—adopted the same day as 2025/966—the power to suspend broadcasting licences of Russian media outlets. The symmetry with Brendan Carr’s FCC threats is not accidental. It is the same logic applied by different hands.
Trump and the EU’s foreign policy apparatus dislike each other intensely. This article is not arguing they are coordinating. What it is arguing is more troubling: they are converging on the same conclusion independently, because that conclusion serves the interests of every government that reaches it.
The conclusion is the information environment is a security domain. Narratives that challenge government policy or undermine institutional legitimacy are, by that logic, security threats. Institutions with authority to manage security threats may therefore claim authority over information. The mechanisms vary—FCC licensing leverage, NSPM-7 terrorism designations, EU sanctions, NATO cognitive warfare doctrine—but the claim is uniform. The state should determine what constitutes acceptable public discourse, and it should have tools to act against those who fall outside that boundary.
This is not a new instinct. Every government in history has had it. What is new is the sophistication and durability of the infrastructure now being built to act on it. The chilling effect of a licensing threat. The advertiser pressure that follows a presidential denunciation. The asset freeze that makes independent journalism economically impossible without a single criminal charge. The algorithmic suppression that platforms apply when content is flagged under a FIMI framework. No editor needs to be arrested. No newsroom needs to be raided. The journalist learns that continued operation is contingent on behaviour the state finds acceptable, and adjusts accordingly.
Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States 57th globally on press freedom in 2025 its lowest position in the index’s history — classifying the environment for American journalism as “problematic.” That was before Brendan Carr told broadcasters they would lose their licenses for covering an undeclared war in terms the administration disliked. The 2026 numbers will be lower.
The apparatus being assembled right now—across administrations that agree on nothing else—will be inherited by every government that follows. States do not voluntarily relinquish instruments of information control once those instruments are built and normalised. They do not return the power to define manipulation to the people who might use it against them. The question is not whether this machinery can be dismantled. The question is whether anyone in a position to resist it has the honesty to call it what it is: censorship infrastructure, flying the flag of security.
