Kash Patel’s war on dissent, & the “dissident” media figures who’ve sold him as an anti-establishment hero

The Kash Patel psyop has cost our social movements many months of extremely precious time in the fight against repression. It’s created hubris where there should be caution, complacency where there should be alertness. When you can get the bulk of the people who are disillusioned with the political establishment to place hope in the same figure who’s been assigned to crush dissent, all of the imperial state’s schemes will be able to go forward with impunity for the perpetrators.

This is why it’s no longer effective to simply speak truth to power: our rulers have become bold enough that they don’t feel a need to conceal their crimes anymore. And a crucial reason why they’ve come to feel so above consequence is that dissent has been thoroughly captured. Even though the majority of the U.S. masses see that our ruling institutions aren’t on their side, it’s easy for the state to create diversions that placate the people. And this is not the people’s fault; the primary ones to blame are the “dissident” figures who have agency to go against the ruling class, but choose to present the people with false solutions. In this case, the “solution” has been to cheer on Kash Patel for his supposed efforts to fight corruption, even though what we’ve seen from Patel is an acceleration of the deep state’s anti-democratic campaigns.

When Trump was trying to get his cabinet picks confirmed, this is the sentiment we heard from commentators like Candace Owens: we’ve got to support every Trump appointee who’s getting pushback from the major parts of government. The core problem with this strategy is that it’s by default a surrender of popular power towards the ruling class; and this is because the elite faction which Trump and Patel represent is inherently antagonistic towards the popular interests.

We’ve seen this when Patel’s FBI has raided the homes of relatively low-profile activists, like San Jose’s Alex Dillard; when it’s added onto ICE’s political persecution efforts by going after Michigan pro-Palestine organizers. Supporting Patel didn’t stop the wave of repression that the deep state had been planning prior to the 2024 election; this only aided the repression by taking attention away from it, and by promoting uncritical praise of Patel. Patel used this to carry out anti-liberty measures that were justified by the Russiagate narrative, which was the same psyop that the deep state once weaponized against Trump. That’s what StopFBI.org has reported in regard to the San Jose raid:

In April 2025, San Jose anti-war activist Alex Dillard was subjected to the execution of a federal search warrant. FBI agents raided his home and seized his personal electronic devices, seeking evidence of alleged ties to Russia and implying that he may have been acting as a foreign agent. We, as members of the San Jose community as well as the broad progressive people's movements in the U.S. and around the world, stand in solidarity with Alex against these attacks. We assert that these accusations are entirely baseless. They constitute a clear act of political retaliation against Alex's First Amendment-protected beliefs, activities, and associations. This incident is not isolated. It reflects a broader pattern of repression by federal agencies against activists, journalists, and organizers who speak out against U.S. imperialism, war, and systemic injustice.

Candace and the other alt media figures who’ve promoted Patel had an opportunity to bring serious public scrutiny upon the FBI; to rally the people against what the FBI is doing at a pivotal moment in the crackdown. And a majority of the conservatives in their audiences would have agreed that the repression is a bad thing. The modern conservative alt media represents a break from the old, unpopular War on Terror conservatism that the Daily Wire has to offer; Candace got the role in the discourse that she now has by splitting with Ben Shapiro over the Gaza genocide. Yet Candace has gone along with the “Kash Patel will change things” narrative, and so have Russell Brand, Tucker Carlson, and other conservatives who’ve sold themselves as transgressive voices. This expectation of a big shake-up due to Patel’s nomination became the default in many online political spaces, and big tech was glad to further boost that narrative in the algorithms.

The outcome of this false hope was that those targeted by the repression were left with far too few allies. There was massive attention on ICE’s persecution of Mahmoud Khalil, but when it’s come to the FBI’s attacks on civil liberties, the backlash has been marginal. Whereas Khalil’s detention actually did create some disillusionment among the MAGA base, the repressive campaign has gone largely unnoticed when it’s been carried out by the FBI, because the supposedly most radical and principled media sources have severely neglected that topic.

My argument is not that this problem will be corrected if these alt media figures learn from their mistakes, because we have no reason to trust them to learn from it. Their loyalty is to capital, and they’re concerned with advancing a business model; so whatever improvements they may make in their messaging, it will come as a reaction to preexisting trends in geopolitics and culture. It’s been an improvement for Tucker to go from promoting the War on Terror to encouraging sympathy with Russia; but he’s done this as part of an imperialist strategy to split Russia from China, which he still vilifies. It’s a good thing that Candace is calling out Zionism, but this has come with efforts by Candace to promote “Judeo-Bolshevik” anti-communist atrocity propaganda. These figures are not leaders of a revolutionary movement, but discourse actors who are trying to divert revolutionary energy. And to build a real movement, we will need to avoid any rhetoric that tails after them.

As Washington’s war on Iran gives the state a pretext for speeding up the crackdown, we have to orient ourselves around defending our orgs from these attacks, and around giving the people the means to fight back. This means applying historical knowledge about how people have resisted repression; how they’ve needed to create both a front guard and a rear guard, balancing the above-ground mass organizing with networks that can operate clandestinely. These are the kinds of things that the most widely visible “dissident” commentators never focus on, and it’s telling what kinds of actions they propose as a substitute. Since the election, when the crackdown has reached its new stage, these figures have at most advocated for siding with one wing of the deep state over another.

That’s what the push to get behind Kash Patel has been, and it’s likely to continue even after Trump has discredited himself through the Iran strikes. One of the narratives that’s become prevalent within alt media is the idea that even though there are bad elements in the Trump White House, there are also figures who could turn things around, and Trump is just being tricked by the bad advisors. Because of the Kash Patel psyop, Patel is still overwhelmingly viewed within these discourse spaces as one of the “good” Trump officials.

There is great intertia and great confusion that’s come from these narrative manipulations, and this has happened at the worst possible time; this is when our government has launched a regional war to save the Zionist entity. The situation is extremely urgent in all areas, and the anti-imperialist movement has been crippled due to how much it’s relied on “alt” media and online politics. Any future our movement has will come from bottom-up organizing, not from appealing towards our rulers through internet campaigns.

The more that real change fails to come from the Trump wing of our ruling class, the more burned-out the masses are going to get on alt media. The danger will then be that dissident politics itself loses momentum, as it won’t have a clear path forward. What we must do is offer the people that path, in the form of a united front against this war drive; one which you don’t need to be a communist to join, but where communists are able to party-build and to propagate our ideas. That’s the role the American Communist Party, which I’m part of, seeks to have in this new antiwar movement. And if we navigate these conditions properly, we’ll be able to forge a different path for dissident circles. One that’s not reliant on any of the top-down forces which seek our movement’s destruction.

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