From Doxxing to Dot.Gov: the White House Has Set Up a Taxpayer Funded Enemies List

Doxing, swatting, bogus FBI calls, stalkers live-streaming outside their homes — it used to be marginal maniacs who saw journalists as targets to be neutralized. Now it’s the President. A government that pardons violent insurrectionists, guts research on far‑right terror, and redirects agents from tracking neo‑Nazis to hunting immigrants is turning its full weight on the people who dare to report any of it.

The anti-hate beat has never been for the faint of heart. Amanda Moore, who embedded with the far Right in 2020, has faced backlash for her reporting for The Nation, Politico, and The Intercept ever since. She’s seen her address, phone, gym schedule, and family details splashed across extremist sites for half a decade — leading to her sister getting swatted at 4 a.m. over a fake suicide call.

Likewise, in North Carolina, Raw Story reporter Jordan Green saw a young neo-Nazi soldier, whom his reporting had tied to the group Patriot Front, show up at his door during a fake pizza delivery. The soldier snapped Green’s photo, then returned weeks later to film a flash rally of extremists right outside the home where Green lives with his wife and children.

Steven Monacelli in Dallas knows this story too. His work tracking extremism, disinformation, and the influence of dark money in politics has won awards — but it’s also cost him. Last year, someone impersonating the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center sent cops to his door with a bogus wife-beating tip on Thanksgiving.

The work of journalists like these was never easy, but as Moore puts it, the people she met praising “a friendlier Nazi Germany” at those conferences years back, are now embedded in the administration:

“The people who are backlashing against me have changed. It’s no longer a live streamer like Nick Fuentes ranting about me for five minutes straight. It’s the former campaign manager for Trump 2024 calling me and threatening me with a lawsuit.”

And that was before the president launched his own doxxing and swatting operation.

Journalists as “offenders”

Last week, the White House launched a new page on its website calling out “biased” journalists by name. This week’s “offender of the week” is a Washington Post writer’s story on Pete Hegseth’s double-tap boat strike in the Caribbean. What used to be a neo-Nazi kill list on Telegram is now a taxpayer-funded enemies list.

At the same time, having quietly removed Biden-era research documenting the outsized threat posed by the extreme Right, and not-so quietly diverting funds and agents away from tracking domestic terror threats to ICE intimidation and abduction duty, Attorney General Pam Bondi is now apparently ordering law enforcement to build a list of “domestic terrorism” groups defined not by violent acts, but by ideas: opposition to immigration enforcement, “radical gender ideology,” anti‑capitalism, “anti‑Christianity,” and so‑called “anti‑American sentiments.”

That is a dragnet for every journalist exposing border abuses, white nationalist infiltration of the Pentagon, or dark money in Dallas politics — and for the communities they cover: immigrants, LGBTQ people, anti‑fascists, pro‑democracy organizers. When the Attorney General tells the FBI to treat domestic dissent as terrorism, every FOIA request, every protest, every byline becomes probable cause. The pizza-fakers and swatters become state enforcers — and earn rewards. According to Ken Klippenstein, who published her leaked memo, Bondi also directs the FBI to establish “a cash reward system” for information.

Corporate media’s deadly quiet

Monied media have ignored the extremism beat for years. They did it again this week. As Klippenstein writes:

“The Justice Department memo I published has elicited outrage across the political spectrum, but hardly any major news outlet can bother to even write about it and how law enforcement is now targeting speech and the basic activities that constitute American civic life. This is an object lesson in everything that’s wrong with corporate media.”

In an atmosphere in which the most powerful man in the world calls reporters who challenge him names, it’s no surprise that some prefer to keep out of the fray. In just the last month, Donald Trump has called half a dozen reporters — all of them women — ugly, stupid, terrible, outrageous and “piggy.” And that’s in public, where he knows his mighty megaphone sends a clear message out to where the violence behind his rhetoric becomes real, fast.

But silence from big media isn’t neutrality; it’s letting impunity spread.

Jordan Green covered a story we’ve reported on extensively on Laura Flanders & Friends: the December 2022 attack on two power stations in Moore County, North Carolina. That sabotage cut off power to tens of thousands of residents for days, in winter, and led to the death of one 87-year-old grandmother who relied on an oxygen machine to breathe. That death was ruled a homicide. Attorney general, now governor, Josh Stein assured us then that the investigation was a top priority — his words — but three years on, no one has been charged and the crime is unsolved.

“It’s a real concern that when FBI agents are diverted to immigration support, or politicized investigations against Trump’s enemies, Right-wing terrorist groups who are planning violence have a sense of impunity,” says Green.

There’s just one problem: impunity requires wrongdoing. In politics and human rights, the word is used when powerful people or institutions break the law or violate rights. In the White House’s “Hall of Shame” era, right-wing terrorists are effectively state agents, and while independent journalists toil on at their own peril, the most powerful media corporations in the country seem to be just fine with that.

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