Marx famously wrote that men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please—a line that has often crossed my mind when updating my résumé. For if there is any historical tendency to be found in my employment chronicles, it is a remarkable knack for boarding sinking ships. I submitted an article to a venerable film magazine the same week that it announced its next issue would be its last; I lucked into one of those startup jobs whose salary and title were commensurate with the difficulty of explaining what you actually do just prior to the 2022 tech crash. But none of these was as inopportune as landing what I imagined to be a secure gig at an eighty-year-old government agency shortly before its wholesale destruction in an unprecedented purge.
Like the rest of the country, those of us at Voice of America had expected some kind of shake-up when Trump took office in 2025, but not one so chaotic and so total in scope. The late February announcement requiring us to send Elon Musk a weekly email listing five accomplishments felt like a bit of absurd theater no one was sure whether to take seriously; some suggested fighting fire with fire and using AI to compose the reports. The next development proved somewhat less comical: over the weekend of March 15th we were suddenly locked out of our email accounts just as an executive order was issued enumerating our agency’s many crimes, such as acknowledging the existence of transgender migrants and not treating Hunter Biden’s laptop as a matter of grave national importance. In the next few months, the government-funded media outlet’s staff would be cut by 85 percent, leaving only a shell of its former operation. This was the culmination of what had been a months-long campaign by Trump and his allies denouncing the agency as a hotbed of radical leftists—incidentally true in my case, but otherwise bitterly ironic. In fact, most of the radical left had long regarded VOA as a reactionary mouthpiece of U.S. imperialism and anti-communist propaganda; by dismantling it the president had unknowingly fulfilled a demand once considered by the Democratic Socialists of America.
These Schrödinger-like accusations of simultaneous communism and anti-communism have accompanied the agency from its very beginning as part of the Office of War Information’s mission to support America’s World War II campaign. At its founding, VOA faced internal division over whether its goal was better served through direct propaganda or by cultivating a broader reputation as an honest and trustworthy news source, the latter approach winning out under director Elmer Davis. Meanwhile, the American-Soviet alliance against Nazism created pressure to emphasize anti-racism and democratic equality as core American values along with relatively favorable portrayals of the USSR—even to the extent of suppressing reports about Stalinist massacres. Throughout the war, these government efforts would draw in many left-leaning individuals, including active members of the Communist Party USA, fellow travelers and refugee European intellectuals like André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Herbert Marcuse. None of this went unnoticed by segregationists, isolationists and anti-communists in Congress. As relations with the Soviets deteriorated following the Allied victory, the House Committee on Un-American Activities shifted its focus back to rooting out government employees with leftist sympathies, and VOA was brought directly under Truman’s State Department to become a major asset in America’s Cold War arsenal.
As the officially recognized counterpart to clandestinely funded Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the agency was actively enlisted in what its own officials dubbed a “psychological scare campaign” of sensational commentary about the communist menace. Broadcasting across the Iron Curtain encouraged domestic dissent within the Eastern Bloc while undermining its governments, which spent millions each year jamming the signals. But despite this new orientation, VOA could not quite escape the suspicion of harboring secret communists—partly because earlier purges had indeed exposed some former employees as KGB assets, and partly because employing large numbers of foreign-language speakers and intellectuals was in itself considered suspect. Most damning was the fact that despite its anti-communist bent, the agency would not strictly limit itself to patriotic propaganda and occasionally reported facts that did not cast the U.S. in the best light. This was anathema to people like Joseph McCarthy and his congressional allies, and in 1953, multiple hearings were launched to expose alleged radical subversion within VOA. With little evidence to go on and openly communist staffers long gone, the senator grasped at every possible straw, such as accusing the agency of deliberately placing a transmitter tower in a suboptimal location to weaken the signal and undermine its own anti-communist message. Although the intense and intrusive personal questioning led to broad demoralization and at least one suicide, the hearings failed to uncover any wrongdoing, and McCarthy’s own downfall followed shortly after.
Following the McCarthy debacle, VOA was moved to an independent agency, technically part of the executive branch but funded by and answerable to Congress. While it was expected to broadly serve U.S. interests, the expanding global battlefield of the Cold War and the growing importance of public opinion in nonaligned countries led Eisenhower to conclude the agency would be more effective if seen as providing neutral information rather than political agitprop. Nevertheless, directors like the famed Edward R. Murrow often coordinated with national security agencies behind the scenes. In this sense, VOA would function similarly to other Cold War operations like the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom and the State Department’s jazz ambassadors, aiming to demonstrate by example that liberal capitalism allowed for a broader range of cultural expression than the alternative, while also subtly promoting views favorable to the U.S. VOA’s 1976 charter would present it as “a reliable and authoritative source of news” providing “a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions” as well as “responsible discussions and opinion” on U.S. policy; a regulatory “firewall” prohibiting government officials from political interference in the editorial process was also codified and strengthened in later legislation. Joseph Nye, the political scientist who popularized the concept of soft power, would articulate this approach in his oft-cited remark: “The best propaganda is not propaganda.” Yet this messaging was not intended for domestic consumption; in fact, until 2013 VOA was barred by law from targeting American audiences precisely due to concerns about propagandizing domestic taxpayers at their expense.
By the time I joined VOA in 2023, soft power had clearly won the day. The Soviet threat was no more, and the orientation of American public diplomacy had shifted from anti-communism to human rights, economic development, press freedom and gender equality. Like any good leftist, I knew all the reasons to be skeptical of these seemingly virtuous goals as promoted by institutions both within and outside the government. Media scholars like Michael Parenti and Noam Chomsky had illuminated the dark underbelly of establishment media: selective coverage, credulity and deference toward government sources, and humanitarian concerns weaponized to justify military interventions. Declassified documents revealed the sordid history of coups, false flags and disinformation campaigns the U.S. had waged in the alleged defense of democracy, including news stories planted under fake names. And thoughtful critiques outlined how the “nonprofit industrial complex” creates dependency, co-opts local community movements and ultimately serves Western financial and corporate interests.
There were some other things I knew as well. For one, having grown up within the crumbling remains of “actually existing socialism,” I knew that it deserved many of the criticisms lodged against it, regardless of their source or intent. I knew that the United States and Western Europe were not uniquely or exceptionally capable of imperialism or genocide, and that Chomsky and Parenti’s skeptical epistemology had disgracefully led them to deny non-Western atrocities in Cambodia and Bosnia as they were happening before the world’s eyes. I knew that there was a tangible difference between living under neoliberal democracy and illiberal authoritarianism, even if both were forms of bourgeois capitalist rule, and that activists struggling against the latter may not have the luxury of concerning themselves with the impure geopolitical motives behind the only sources of aid and funding available to them. Most of all, I had seen firsthand how easily much of the left had been duped regarding my birthplace of Ukraine—denouncing the only major former Soviet republic to preserve democratic elections and an independent civil society for having a far-right minority within a liberal government—while excusing its invasion by an openly reactionary imperial autocracy already ruled by the far right as an anti-imperialist gesture. So when I was initially referred to VOA by a Ukrainian friend for some freelance projects debunking Russian war propaganda, there was little hesitation on my part.
However, coming aboard for a full-time position covering broader international news did give me some pause. Although some friends had worked at other state-owned outlets like Al Jazeera and RT, I knew that working for VOA would draw particular derision from the same parts of the left I had clashed with when advocating for Ukraine: armchair-strategy gamers who regard foreign populations as pawns on the grand geopolitical chess table they imagine themselves seated at, pedants who roll their eyes at the mention of democracy or human rights from safe perches where neither are yet seriously threatened, edgelords who channel their impotent power fantasies into necrophilic cult worship of bygone dictators and Twitter bios full of flag emojis. And while I could not have held more contempt for such people’s opinions, I did care about the concrete impact of my work conflicting with my own values. I had already made my peace with the inevitable bias in VOA’s focus and proportion of coverage, such as running more stories about the human-rights abuses of America’s adversaries than those of its allies—as long as the former was true, one just had to look elsewhere for the latter. With no delusions about changing the system from within, I only aimed to avoid writing any objectionable or misleading content myself—which proved easy enough. Aside from an instance where my report on China’s foreign mineral interests had a line added to make it sound slightly more ominous, I faced no editorial pressure and was relatively free in choosing assignments, my output speaking for itself as a stream of informative, if boring, explainers on world events. One of my few investigative articles spotlighted media repression in Azerbaijan, generally regarded as a Western ally; I even managed to sneak a Gramsci quote into a piece about New Year resolutions.
And then along came October 7th and all-hands-on-deck coverage of the Gaza war. The Israel-Palestine conflict was a third rail I had dreaded touching, but after bracing myself for the worst I was initially pleasantly surprised. Many of the other VOA journalists covering the Middle East were, appropriately, Arabic speakers with roots in the region, and while they likely came from the most pro-American social strata, they would have needed a Herculean capacity for mental contortion and self-dehumanization to deliberately cast Israel’s mass slaughter in a positive light. Instead, we simply stuck to the letter of the charter and reported the course of events—both the massacre of Israelis by Hamas and the massively disproportionate massacre Israel unleashed in response—as carefully and accurately as possible, knowing that every word would be scrutinized under a microscope. As one might expect, there were limits to which sources and perspectives could be treated as fully legitimate. But even with the required addendum of “according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza” tacked onto all casualty numbers like a parental-advisory sticker, the bare facts, figures and images were sufficient for anyone who had not preemptively shut their eyes, and likely more effective in credibility than the grandiloquent denunciations of “Zionist settler-colonial butchery” found in leftist publications. Ultimately, our coverage was more objective than that of the New York Times—admittedly a low bar to clear—precisely because we were funded by the government to address broad foreign audiences.
Or so we had thought. After the first couple of weeks, the screws began to turn as right-wing outlets combed through the personal social media accounts of staffers and freelancers for any evidence of anti-Israel posts. When I asked my editor if I should be worried, his response came with a laugh: “You’ll be fine—you don’t have an Arabic name.” But there was more to come. On October 10th, an editorial memo had been sent out clarifying official organization names, Arabic transliterations and other mundane details. Among these was guidance taken straight from the AP Stylebook recommending against the phrase “Hamas terrorists” in favor of constructions like “the militant group Hamas” or “Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization” where appropriate. The issue was mainly one of style and tone—appending “terrorist” as a pejorative epithet to every mention of a group reads more like an all-caps email forward from an unhinged boomer relative than anything resembling objective journalism. But of course this was not how the leaked memo was portrayed by right-wing media, prompting hysterical denunciations and a Republican-led congressional probe accusing VOA of pro-Hamas sympathies. The uproar was temporarily extinguished via a combination of apology and clarification by VOA directors but would later resurface as one of the key pieces of “evidence” used by Trump’s demolition team.
Prior to the 2024 election, internal speculation on what might happen had been met with reassurances that any impact would be contained. After all, there was precedent—in his first term Trump had indeed tried to turn VOA into a right-wing mouthpiece by replacing division heads and board members with Bannon-aligned conservative media cranks, ironically empowered by an Obama-era defense bill transferring authority from a bipartisan board to a president-appointed CEO in the name of “streamlining operations.” But whistleblowing campaigns and lawsuits launched by VOA staff had successfully impeded attempts to entrench the new leadership, and the agency was largely restored upon Biden’s election. Now Trump had learned from his mistakes and understood that trying to corral hundreds of journalists to do his bidding would be harder than just eliminating them.
This time, the statutory protections that had helped preserve VOA through Trump’s first administration were simply ignored as failed gubernatorial candidate and election conspiracy theorist Kari Lake, appointed by Trump to the newly invented position of “senior advisor,” quickly set about implementing his order to reduce the agency to the “minimum presence and function required by law” despite her questionable (or nonexistent) authority to do so. The following weeks were a blur as we were placed on administrative leave via poorly worded weekend emails, received termination notices that were rescinded the same week, and were put back on leave only to receive termination notices again—this time apparently for good. After being gutted early on, the Persian-language team was frantically recalled to work in June as missiles began to fly between Israel and Iran. Through it all, my colleagues seemed caught in a mix of shock and denial, and while I sympathized, there was an element of cognitive dissonance in the air. Many expressed indignation at the mere suggestion of bias, insisting on their nonpartisanship and professionalism while in the same breath denouncing the administration and their agenda in the strongest possible terms. In a sense, we were retroactively proving Trump’s point: we might not have all been radical leftists, but it was clear there was hardly a single person in the newsroom who had voted for or supported him.
And how could it have been any different? An international media outlet employing hundreds of foreign journalists with the stated mission of promoting civil liberties abroad was bound to be incompatible with an administration that was attacking the same liberties at home and had made xenophobic nationalism central to its political platform. The fundamental tensions that had plagued VOA since its inception were now coming to a head. The promotion of democracy and human rights had been accepted as a vector of foreign policy because it correctly identified a weak point of America’s Cold War rivals, just as the Soviets had effectively used anti-racism to embarrass the U.S. These cynical ulterior motives had nevertheless produced genuinely universalist results, spurring on, respectively, a relaxation in the USSR’s treatment of dissidents and the growth of America’s civil rights movement. But now that these liberal internationalist ideals had been discarded as no longer useful to American interests, they could only be justified from an overtly ideological stance—one that was incompatible with the agency’s institutional framework.
More than the particular content of VOA’s messaging, the issue has been the idea of soft power itself. At the root of both the McCarthy and Trump purges lies a hostility to this very concept, where any attempt to engage an international public sphere on its own terms, rather than those unilaterally dictated by Washington, is itself seen as foreign subversion. And this hostility is not confined to the political right. In opposing what they consider Western imperialism, some on the left have defended “foreign agent” laws targeting civil society organizations in places like Russia and Georgia on the basis of “sovereignty”—thereby aligning with right-wing nationalists railing against “LGBT propaganda”—or celebrated the defunding of USAID despite knowing that it would entail mass death in the poorest parts of the world. There is a parallel cynicism at work: this sector of the left claims that there is ultimately no difference between soft power and hard power, with the former merely a deceptive disguise for the latter; thus one may conclude there is no real difference in kind between Western meddling via funding for activists and Russian meddling via artillery strikes on city centers. Trump begins from the same premise—his appointees and allies have even adopted leftist language disparaging “color revolutions”—and concludes that the disguise is expensive and unnecessary when naked force and economic interest will do just fine. (At the risk of being called a liberal, I would humbly suggest that the distinction between soft and hard power nevertheless retains some significance for those on the receiving end.)
The legacy of the Cold War ingrained in the left a Pavlovian reflex of opposing Western foreign policy, to the point that such opposition is mistaken for a first principle rather than a historical contingency. This in turn has led to several points of confusion. One is the pervasive idea that the mere existence of geopolitical rivalry with the U.S. is a good in itself regardless of its character. Another is a hostile suspicion toward universalist democratic principles as artifacts of Western imperialism—not just in their inconsistent application, but in and of themselves. “Multipolarity” is now often touted as if it were naturally a progressive goal and not simply a return to a pre-twentieth-century global order in which great powers carved up the world into competing spheres of influence before nearly destroying it. Ironically, this comes at a time when the major power blocs are all converging on a common political model of hypermilitarized economic nationalism, socially regressive historical revisionism and increased repression and surveillance under a system of “managed democracy.” Meanwhile, the truly wretched of the earth—the minorities, refugees and dissidents within each bloc—will find that no one is coming to save them after all.
America itself is no exception. In the months since the initial purges, the Trump administration has unilaterally threatened the entire Western hemisphere as well as European allies while continuing its assault on press and political freedoms—ironically the very kinds of developments VOA specialized in covering abroad. As of this writing, the agency still technically exists in a greatly diminished state, with its main website not updated since March 2025, broadcasts replaced with music or reruns and its dozens of language services cut down to a handful—a Potemkin village that allows the administration to maintain in court that they are meeting the “statutory minimum” and have not shut it down, which only Congress can do. And although ongoing lawsuits may yet bring some more of the unionized federal employees back to work, those of us hired as contractors won’t be holding our breath. Meanwhile, the public effort to save and restore VOA has continued with social media campaigns and statements of support. But these laments from legislators and former NATO officials, full of dire warnings about losing the information space to Russia and China and appeals to national security interests, are not only unconvincing but stage the battle on unfavorable terrain. What exactly are our national interests, and who defines them if not the government? If American national interests now lie in mercantilism and naked land grabs, then it is indeed difficult to see what promoting democracy or press freedom abroad has to do with them—if anything, Trump finds it easier to make deals with autocrats.
In fact, the Trump administration isn’t technically wrong. A universalist defense of democratic freedoms against unaccountable authority is not in America’s national interest, strictly defined—nor that of any other government. It belongs to an older, broader and, yes, more radical tradition whose modern thread runs from the American and French revolutions, through the abolitionists, to the civil rights movement and the anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century. None of these were politically neutral as they occurred, and to the extent that they were later sanitized to form a shared national consensus, that consensus is quickly being unraveled. When politicians openly muse about repealing women’s suffrage, enforcement agencies admit to targeting people based on ethnicity and oligarchs are put directly in charge of stripping the government for parts, the most milquetoast defense of civil rights or a functional public sphere providing common goods becomes a “radical” position—one that can only be consistently championed from the left, provided we are willing to take up the banner.
I have already lived through the collapse of one empire and currently appear to be living through another, both deeply flawed entities perhaps well deserving of their fall. But what followed the Soviet model was the worst of both worlds, retaining its authoritarianism and cynical disregard for life while discarding even its superficial commitment to egalitarian utopianism; what is likely to follow the liberal world order is an entrenchment of oligarchy and exploitation without even a rhetorical appeal to human dignity. And while such appeals have long been marked by hypocrisy, the idea that open despotism would be somehow preferable or more conducive to revolution is a nihilistic accelerationist fantasy. La Rochefoucauld once noted that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue; a world of unrestrained vice where such tribute is no longer collected will be a worse place to live, not a better one. It is precisely in such a world that we need an international left willing to reject the fashionable posture of treating “liberal” ideals with skeptical disdain and to reaffirm them as fundamental to its political project—as the very reasons to oppose capitalism and imperialism in the first place. Rather than impediments to socialism, democracy and human rights are its necessary precursors—something the oligarchs of the world have understood all too well. And the defense of these principles is too important to leave solely to government-backed institutions whose masters will inevitably betray them.
Photo credit: Voice of America
Marx famously wrote that men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please—a line that has often crossed my mind when updating my résumé. For if there is any historical tendency to be found in my employment chronicles, it is a remarkable knack for boarding sinking ships. I submitted an article to a venerable film magazine the same week that it announced its next issue would be its last; I lucked into one of those startup jobs whose salary and title were commensurate with the difficulty of explaining what you actually do just prior to the 2022 tech crash. But none of these was as inopportune as landing what I imagined to be a secure gig at an eighty-year-old government agency shortly before its wholesale destruction in an unprecedented purge.
Like the rest of the country, those of us at Voice of America had expected some kind of shake-up when Trump took office in 2025, but not one so chaotic and so total in scope. The late February announcement requiring us to send Elon Musk a weekly email listing five accomplishments felt like a bit of absurd theater no one was sure whether to take seriously; some suggested fighting fire with fire and using AI to compose the reports. The next development proved somewhat less comical: over the weekend of March 15th we were suddenly locked out of our email accounts just as an executive order was issued enumerating our agency’s many crimes, such as acknowledging the existence of transgender migrants and not treating Hunter Biden’s laptop as a matter of grave national importance. In the next few months, the government-funded media outlet’s staff would be cut by 85 percent, leaving only a shell of its former operation. This was the culmination of what had been a months-long campaign by Trump and his allies denouncing the agency as a hotbed of radical leftists—incidentally true in my case, but otherwise bitterly ironic. In fact, most of the radical left had long regarded VOA as a reactionary mouthpiece of U.S. imperialism and anti-communist propaganda; by dismantling it the president had unknowingly fulfilled a demand once considered by the Democratic Socialists of America.
These Schrödinger-like accusations of simultaneous communism and anti-communism have accompanied the agency from its very beginning as part of the Office of War Information’s mission to support America’s World War II campaign. At its founding, VOA faced internal division over whether its goal was better served through direct propaganda or by cultivating a broader reputation as an honest and trustworthy news source, the latter approach winning out under director Elmer Davis. Meanwhile, the American-Soviet alliance against Nazism created pressure to emphasize anti-racism and democratic equality as core American values along with relatively favorable portrayals of the USSR—even to the extent of suppressing reports about Stalinist massacres. Throughout the war, these government efforts would draw in many left-leaning individuals, including active members of the Communist Party USA, fellow travelers and refugee European intellectuals like André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Herbert Marcuse. None of this went unnoticed by segregationists, isolationists and anti-communists in Congress. As relations with the Soviets deteriorated following the Allied victory, the House Committee on Un-American Activities shifted its focus back to rooting out government employees with leftist sympathies, and VOA was brought directly under Truman’s State Department to become a major asset in America’s Cold War arsenal.
As the officially recognized counterpart to clandestinely funded Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the agency was actively enlisted in what its own officials dubbed a “psychological scare campaign” of sensational commentary about the communist menace. Broadcasting across the Iron Curtain encouraged domestic dissent within the Eastern Bloc while undermining its governments, which spent millions each year jamming the signals. But despite this new orientation, VOA could not quite escape the suspicion of harboring secret communists—partly because earlier purges had indeed exposed some former employees as KGB assets, and partly because employing large numbers of foreign-language speakers and intellectuals was in itself considered suspect. Most damning was the fact that despite its anti-communist bent, the agency would not strictly limit itself to patriotic propaganda and occasionally reported facts that did not cast the U.S. in the best light. This was anathema to people like Joseph McCarthy and his congressional allies, and in 1953, multiple hearings were launched to expose alleged radical subversion within VOA. With little evidence to go on and openly communist staffers long gone, the senator grasped at every possible straw, such as accusing the agency of deliberately placing a transmitter tower in a suboptimal location to weaken the signal and undermine its own anti-communist message. Although the intense and intrusive personal questioning led to broad demoralization and at least one suicide, the hearings failed to uncover any wrongdoing, and McCarthy’s own downfall followed shortly after.
Following the McCarthy debacle, VOA was moved to an independent agency, technically part of the executive branch but funded by and answerable to Congress. While it was expected to broadly serve U.S. interests, the expanding global battlefield of the Cold War and the growing importance of public opinion in nonaligned countries led Eisenhower to conclude the agency would be more effective if seen as providing neutral information rather than political agitprop. Nevertheless, directors like the famed Edward R. Murrow often coordinated with national security agencies behind the scenes. In this sense, VOA would function similarly to other Cold War operations like the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom and the State Department’s jazz ambassadors, aiming to demonstrate by example that liberal capitalism allowed for a broader range of cultural expression than the alternative, while also subtly promoting views favorable to the U.S. VOA’s 1976 charter would present it as “a reliable and authoritative source of news” providing “a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions” as well as “responsible discussions and opinion” on U.S. policy; a regulatory “firewall” prohibiting government officials from political interference in the editorial process was also codified and strengthened in later legislation. Joseph Nye, the political scientist who popularized the concept of soft power, would articulate this approach in his oft-cited remark: “The best propaganda is not propaganda.” Yet this messaging was not intended for domestic consumption; in fact, until 2013 VOA was barred by law from targeting American audiences precisely due to concerns about propagandizing domestic taxpayers at their expense.
By the time I joined VOA in 2023, soft power had clearly won the day. The Soviet threat was no more, and the orientation of American public diplomacy had shifted from anti-communism to human rights, economic development, press freedom and gender equality. Like any good leftist, I knew all the reasons to be skeptical of these seemingly virtuous goals as promoted by institutions both within and outside the government. Media scholars like Michael Parenti and Noam Chomsky had illuminated the dark underbelly of establishment media: selective coverage, credulity and deference toward government sources, and humanitarian concerns weaponized to justify military interventions. Declassified documents revealed the sordid history of coups, false flags and disinformation campaigns the U.S. had waged in the alleged defense of democracy, including news stories planted under fake names. And thoughtful critiques outlined how the “nonprofit industrial complex” creates dependency, co-opts local community movements and ultimately serves Western financial and corporate interests.
There were some other things I knew as well. For one, having grown up within the crumbling remains of “actually existing socialism,” I knew that it deserved many of the criticisms lodged against it, regardless of their source or intent. I knew that the United States and Western Europe were not uniquely or exceptionally capable of imperialism or genocide, and that Chomsky and Parenti’s skeptical epistemology had disgracefully led them to deny non-Western atrocities in Cambodia and Bosnia as they were happening before the world’s eyes. I knew that there was a tangible difference between living under neoliberal democracy and illiberal authoritarianism, even if both were forms of bourgeois capitalist rule, and that activists struggling against the latter may not have the luxury of concerning themselves with the impure geopolitical motives behind the only sources of aid and funding available to them. Most of all, I had seen firsthand how easily much of the left had been duped regarding my birthplace of Ukraine—denouncing the only major former Soviet republic to preserve democratic elections and an independent civil society for having a far-right minority within a liberal government—while excusing its invasion by an openly reactionary imperial autocracy already ruled by the far right as an anti-imperialist gesture. So when I was initially referred to VOA by a Ukrainian friend for some freelance projects debunking Russian war propaganda, there was little hesitation on my part.
However, coming aboard for a full-time position covering broader international news did give me some pause. Although some friends had worked at other state-owned outlets like Al Jazeera and RT, I knew that working for VOA would draw particular derision from the same parts of the left I had clashed with when advocating for Ukraine: armchair-strategy gamers who regard foreign populations as pawns on the grand geopolitical chess table they imagine themselves seated at, pedants who roll their eyes at the mention of democracy or human rights from safe perches where neither are yet seriously threatened, edgelords who channel their impotent power fantasies into necrophilic cult worship of bygone dictators and Twitter bios full of flag emojis. And while I could not have held more contempt for such people’s opinions, I did care about the concrete impact of my work conflicting with my own values. I had already made my peace with the inevitable bias in VOA’s focus and proportion of coverage, such as running more stories about the human-rights abuses of America’s adversaries than those of its allies—as long as the former was true, one just had to look elsewhere for the latter. With no delusions about changing the system from within, I only aimed to avoid writing any objectionable or misleading content myself—which proved easy enough. Aside from an instance where my report on China’s foreign mineral interests had a line added to make it sound slightly more ominous, I faced no editorial pressure and was relatively free in choosing assignments, my output speaking for itself as a stream of informative, if boring, explainers on world events. One of my few investigative articles spotlighted media repression in Azerbaijan, generally regarded as a Western ally; I even managed to sneak a Gramsci quote into a piece about New Year resolutions.
And then along came October 7th and all-hands-on-deck coverage of the Gaza war. The Israel-Palestine conflict was a third rail I had dreaded touching, but after bracing myself for the worst I was initially pleasantly surprised. Many of the other VOA journalists covering the Middle East were, appropriately, Arabic speakers with roots in the region, and while they likely came from the most pro-American social strata, they would have needed a Herculean capacity for mental contortion and self-dehumanization to deliberately cast Israel’s mass slaughter in a positive light. Instead, we simply stuck to the letter of the charter and reported the course of events—both the massacre of Israelis by Hamas and the massively disproportionate massacre Israel unleashed in response—as carefully and accurately as possible, knowing that every word would be scrutinized under a microscope. As one might expect, there were limits to which sources and perspectives could be treated as fully legitimate. But even with the required addendum of “according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza” tacked onto all casualty numbers like a parental-advisory sticker, the bare facts, figures and images were sufficient for anyone who had not preemptively shut their eyes, and likely more effective in credibility than the grandiloquent denunciations of “Zionist settler-colonial butchery” found in leftist publications. Ultimately, our coverage was more objective than that of the New York Times—admittedly a low bar to clear—precisely because we were funded by the government to address broad foreign audiences.
Or so we had thought. After the first couple of weeks, the screws began to turn as right-wing outlets combed through the personal social media accounts of staffers and freelancers for any evidence of anti-Israel posts. When I asked my editor if I should be worried, his response came with a laugh: “You’ll be fine—you don’t have an Arabic name.” But there was more to come. On October 10th, an editorial memo had been sent out clarifying official organization names, Arabic transliterations and other mundane details. Among these was guidance taken straight from the AP Stylebook recommending against the phrase “Hamas terrorists” in favor of constructions like “the militant group Hamas” or “Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization” where appropriate. The issue was mainly one of style and tone—appending “terrorist” as a pejorative epithet to every mention of a group reads more like an all-caps email forward from an unhinged boomer relative than anything resembling objective journalism. But of course this was not how the leaked memo was portrayed by right-wing media, prompting hysterical denunciations and a Republican-led congressional probe accusing VOA of pro-Hamas sympathies. The uproar was temporarily extinguished via a combination of apology and clarification by VOA directors but would later resurface as one of the key pieces of “evidence” used by Trump’s demolition team.
Prior to the 2024 election, internal speculation on what might happen had been met with reassurances that any impact would be contained. After all, there was precedent—in his first term Trump had indeed tried to turn VOA into a right-wing mouthpiece by replacing division heads and board members with Bannon-aligned conservative media cranks, ironically empowered by an Obama-era defense bill transferring authority from a bipartisan board to a president-appointed CEO in the name of “streamlining operations.” But whistleblowing campaigns and lawsuits launched by VOA staff had successfully impeded attempts to entrench the new leadership, and the agency was largely restored upon Biden’s election. Now Trump had learned from his mistakes and understood that trying to corral hundreds of journalists to do his bidding would be harder than just eliminating them.
This time, the statutory protections that had helped preserve VOA through Trump’s first administration were simply ignored as failed gubernatorial candidate and election conspiracy theorist Kari Lake, appointed by Trump to the newly invented position of “senior advisor,” quickly set about implementing his order to reduce the agency to the “minimum presence and function required by law” despite her questionable (or nonexistent) authority to do so. The following weeks were a blur as we were placed on administrative leave via poorly worded weekend emails, received termination notices that were rescinded the same week, and were put back on leave only to receive termination notices again—this time apparently for good. After being gutted early on, the Persian-language team was frantically recalled to work in June as missiles began to fly between Israel and Iran. Through it all, my colleagues seemed caught in a mix of shock and denial, and while I sympathized, there was an element of cognitive dissonance in the air. Many expressed indignation at the mere suggestion of bias, insisting on their nonpartisanship and professionalism while in the same breath denouncing the administration and their agenda in the strongest possible terms. In a sense, we were retroactively proving Trump’s point: we might not have all been radical leftists, but it was clear there was hardly a single person in the newsroom who had voted for or supported him.
And how could it have been any different? An international media outlet employing hundreds of foreign journalists with the stated mission of promoting civil liberties abroad was bound to be incompatible with an administration that was attacking the same liberties at home and had made xenophobic nationalism central to its political platform. The fundamental tensions that had plagued VOA since its inception were now coming to a head. The promotion of democracy and human rights had been accepted as a vector of foreign policy because it correctly identified a weak point of America’s Cold War rivals, just as the Soviets had effectively used anti-racism to embarrass the U.S. These cynical ulterior motives had nevertheless produced genuinely universalist results, spurring on, respectively, a relaxation in the USSR’s treatment of dissidents and the growth of America’s civil rights movement. But now that these liberal internationalist ideals had been discarded as no longer useful to American interests, they could only be justified from an overtly ideological stance—one that was incompatible with the agency’s institutional framework.
More than the particular content of VOA’s messaging, the issue has been the idea of soft power itself. At the root of both the McCarthy and Trump purges lies a hostility to this very concept, where any attempt to engage an international public sphere on its own terms, rather than those unilaterally dictated by Washington, is itself seen as foreign subversion. And this hostility is not confined to the political right. In opposing what they consider Western imperialism, some on the left have defended “foreign agent” laws targeting civil society organizations in places like Russia and Georgia on the basis of “sovereignty”—thereby aligning with right-wing nationalists railing against “LGBT propaganda”—or celebrated the defunding of USAID despite knowing that it would entail mass death in the poorest parts of the world. There is a parallel cynicism at work: this sector of the left claims that there is ultimately no difference between soft power and hard power, with the former merely a deceptive disguise for the latter; thus one may conclude there is no real difference in kind between Western meddling via funding for activists and Russian meddling via artillery strikes on city centers. Trump begins from the same premise—his appointees and allies have even adopted leftist language disparaging “color revolutions”—and concludes that the disguise is expensive and unnecessary when naked force and economic interest will do just fine. (At the risk of being called a liberal, I would humbly suggest that the distinction between soft and hard power nevertheless retains some significance for those on the receiving end.)
The legacy of the Cold War ingrained in the left a Pavlovian reflex of opposing Western foreign policy, to the point that such opposition is mistaken for a first principle rather than a historical contingency. This in turn has led to several points of confusion. One is the pervasive idea that the mere existence of geopolitical rivalry with the U.S. is a good in itself regardless of its character. Another is a hostile suspicion toward universalist democratic principles as artifacts of Western imperialism—not just in their inconsistent application, but in and of themselves. “Multipolarity” is now often touted as if it were naturally a progressive goal and not simply a return to a pre-twentieth-century global order in which great powers carved up the world into competing spheres of influence before nearly destroying it. Ironically, this comes at a time when the major power blocs are all converging on a common political model of hypermilitarized economic nationalism, socially regressive historical revisionism and increased repression and surveillance under a system of “managed democracy.” Meanwhile, the truly wretched of the earth—the minorities, refugees and dissidents within each bloc—will find that no one is coming to save them after all.
America itself is no exception. In the months since the initial purges, the Trump administration has unilaterally threatened the entire Western hemisphere as well as European allies while continuing its assault on press and political freedoms—ironically the very kinds of developments VOA specialized in covering abroad. As of this writing, the agency still technically exists in a greatly diminished state, with its main website not updated since March 2025, broadcasts replaced with music or reruns and its dozens of language services cut down to a handful—a Potemkin village that allows the administration to maintain in court that they are meeting the “statutory minimum” and have not shut it down, which only Congress can do. And although ongoing lawsuits may yet bring some more of the unionized federal employees back to work, those of us hired as contractors won’t be holding our breath. Meanwhile, the public effort to save and restore VOA has continued with social media campaigns and statements of support. But these laments from legislators and former NATO officials, full of dire warnings about losing the information space to Russia and China and appeals to national security interests, are not only unconvincing but stage the battle on unfavorable terrain. What exactly are our national interests, and who defines them if not the government? If American national interests now lie in mercantilism and naked land grabs, then it is indeed difficult to see what promoting democracy or press freedom abroad has to do with them—if anything, Trump finds it easier to make deals with autocrats.
In fact, the Trump administration isn’t technically wrong. A universalist defense of democratic freedoms against unaccountable authority is not in America’s national interest, strictly defined—nor that of any other government. It belongs to an older, broader and, yes, more radical tradition whose modern thread runs from the American and French revolutions, through the abolitionists, to the civil rights movement and the anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century. None of these were politically neutral as they occurred, and to the extent that they were later sanitized to form a shared national consensus, that consensus is quickly being unraveled. When politicians openly muse about repealing women’s suffrage, enforcement agencies admit to targeting people based on ethnicity and oligarchs are put directly in charge of stripping the government for parts, the most milquetoast defense of civil rights or a functional public sphere providing common goods becomes a “radical” position—one that can only be consistently championed from the left, provided we are willing to take up the banner.
I have already lived through the collapse of one empire and currently appear to be living through another, both deeply flawed entities perhaps well deserving of their fall. But what followed the Soviet model was the worst of both worlds, retaining its authoritarianism and cynical disregard for life while discarding even its superficial commitment to egalitarian utopianism; what is likely to follow the liberal world order is an entrenchment of oligarchy and exploitation without even a rhetorical appeal to human dignity. And while such appeals have long been marked by hypocrisy, the idea that open despotism would be somehow preferable or more conducive to revolution is a nihilistic accelerationist fantasy. La Rochefoucauld once noted that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue; a world of unrestrained vice where such tribute is no longer collected will be a worse place to live, not a better one. It is precisely in such a world that we need an international left willing to reject the fashionable posture of treating “liberal” ideals with skeptical disdain and to reaffirm them as fundamental to its political project—as the very reasons to oppose capitalism and imperialism in the first place. Rather than impediments to socialism, democracy and human rights are its necessary precursors—something the oligarchs of the world have understood all too well. And the defense of these principles is too important to leave solely to government-backed institutions whose masters will inevitably betray them.
Photo credit: Voice of America
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