Russia is already at Estonia’s gates. Tallinn may become the next target for Russia’s aggressive war because the Russians have several convenient pretexts for it, The Economist reports. 

For several years, Russia has been conducting a covert campaign of intimidation and destabilization against Estonia, using cyberattacks, undercover agents, sabotage, and legions of disinformation bots on social media.

NATO recognizes these risks and has been increasing its military presence in the region: currently, over 2,000 troops from allied countries are stationed in Estonia.

However, amid the reduction of American forces in Europe, Estonia could become the place where Russia first attempts to test the reliability of NATO’s Article 5 on collective defense. 

Between the 1950s and 1980s, the Kremlin resettled hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians to Estonia, and today they make up one-fifth of the country’s 1.4 million population. The largest number of them are living in the city of Narva, located right on the border with Russia. Nearly the entire population there is descended from Russian settlers.

More than 30 years later, Russians have shifted from a politically dominant group to a lower-class minority, though many in Narva still feel attached to the Soviet version of history.

Since the war in Ukraine began, Russian destabilizing efforts have intensified throughout Estonia. Last year, a sociology professor who seemed liberal was exposed as a Russian agent. In 2023, vandals damaged the cars of the Minister of Internal Affairs and the editor of a Russian-language news website.

At the same time, Russian attempts to recruit Russian speakers for minor sabotage through social media have found little support.

Russia recruits elderly in covert sabotage campaign across Ukraine and Europe

The war in Ukraine has united Estonians but divided the Russians living there. Some feel sympathy for their homeland, where many have relatives; some resent Estonian nationalism. Some are Putin supporters or simply wish for a brotherly alliance like in the old days. Others, especially younger people, warmly welcome Ukrainian refugees into their schools and communities.

Since 2022, the Estonian government has taken steps to isolate Estonia from Russia. It stopped issuing visas to Russian citizens, restricted Russian business activities, banned Russian TV channels from cable packages, and removed Soviet-era monuments. This year, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania disconnected their electricity grids from Russia.

Most of the well-known and most controversial Estonian residents holding Russian passports, who previously could vote in municipal elections, will no longer be able to do so after this year’s elections.

A Trump official who dismantled a counter-disinformation office in the United States government has links to the Kremlin, the Telegraph reported on June 3.

Darren Beattie, who was appointed to the State Department in February 2025 as under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, has come under scrutiny for his pro-Russian views. According to the Telegraph, Beattie is married to a Russian woman with links to the Kremlin.

His wife – Yulia Kirillova – is the niece of Sergei Chernikov, a former Russian official who reportedly helped Russian President Vladimir Putin in the election campaign which first brought him to power in 2000.

Beattie notably played a role in dismantling the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, or R/FIMI, which was previously tasked with tracking and countering disinformation from Russia, China, and Iran.

R/FIMI was officially shut down in April 2025, according to a press statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who claimed that the office "spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving."

According to sources cited by the Telegraph, Beattie relentlessly pursued R/FIMI after his appointment to the State Department. Secretary Rubio confirmed that Beattie played a significant role in dismantling the agency.

Beattie also showed a keen interest in classified materials related to Russia, raising concerns about granting him access to sensitive information. The sources also expressed concerns about whether he had been adequately vetted – a process that can take anywhere from a couple of months to over a year to complete.

Beattie previously served in the first Trump administration but was ousted after allegedly attending a white nationalist conference in 2018. Since then, he reinvented himself as an "alt-right media" figure and founded the news outlet Revolver.

Through Revolver, Beattie has long criticized R/FIMI and promoted narratives aligned with Kremlin disinformation. He has argued that the U.S. orchestrates "color revolutions" around the world, including in Ukraine – a common narrative used in Kremlin propaganda to delegitimize pro-democracy movements as Western-backed coups.

Beattie has also written social media posts suggesting that Western institutions should be "infiltrated" by the Kremlin, and has attacked the so-called "globalist American empire."

Two months before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Beattie wrote on X: "Imagine the whining from the Globalist American Empire if Putin 'invades' Ukraine... love it when our national security bureaucrats fail!"

The Trump administration has repeatedly come under fire for its perceived sympathies toward Russia. It has also been criticized for shuttering R/FIMI, particularly amidst a global "information war."

According to the National Endowment for Democracy, Russia spends an estimated $1.5 billion annually on disinformation and foreign influence campaigns. In Europe alone, the Kremlin is believed to be behind 80% of disinformation operations.

US House Speaker Johnson backs Senate bill to toughen sanctions on Russia

“There’s many members of Congress that want us to sanction Russia as strongly as we can,” U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said. “And I’m an advocate of that.”

The Kyiv IndependentKateryna Denisova

Russia-aligned influence campaigns have intensified efforts to spread disinformation targeting Ukrainian refugees in Poland ahead of the country’s presidential runoff election on June 1, according to a new investigation by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).

ISD found that Russia-aligned actors are amplifying anti-Ukrainian sentiment through coordinated campaigns across platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky, Facebook, and Telegram. These efforts include operations like "Operation Overload" and the pro-Kremlin network "Pravda/Portal Kombat," which use impersonation, AI-generated content, and coordinated amplification to push false narratives.

One Operation Overload campaign claimed that Ukrainian refugees were preparing terrorist attacks targeting the Polish elections, garnering over 654,000 views and nearly 5,800 interactions on X. Another falsely accused Ukrainians of plotting attacks on politicians in neighboring countries.

The investigation, published on May 30, highlighted that ChatGPT replicated misleading claims from the Pravda network, including accusations that Ukrainians were responsible for a rise in violent crime in Poland. A satirical video about refugees was manipulated by a pro-Kremlin influencer to portray Ukrainians as exploiting Poland’s welfare system, sparking calls for deportations and online hate. The influencer’s post alone received 161,500 views, 900 shares, and 380 comments, many of which were derogatory.

ISD warns that immigration has become a key issue in the Polish election discourse, noting that both remaining presidential candidates have taken positions targeting Ukrainian refugees. Candidate Rafal Trzaskowski proposed halting child benefits for non-working refugees, while Karol Nawrocki suggested placing them last in line for public services. The investigation urges Polish authorities to remain vigilant against Russia-backed disinformation that fuels discrimination and societal division.

ISD also calls on platforms to meet their obligations under the EU’s Digital Services Act by clearly labeling AI-generated content and addressing systemic risks to electoral integrity. The European Commission is urged to expand enforcement of sanctions on Russian-linked aggregators and to coordinate with internet service providers to counter foreign information manipulation more effectively.

Ukraine watches closely as Poland faces polarizing presidential run-off

Poland’s presidential race has never seen a first-round winner with so many reasons to worry, the far right so emboldened, and Ukraine so central to the campaign. The June 1 run-off between Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski of the ruling Civic Platform (PO) and Karol Nawrocki, backed by Law and

The Kyiv IndependentAleksander Palikot

The Czech court has convicted a teacher of pro-Russian propaganda in class, iRozhlas reports.

A court in Prague has delivered a guilty verdict in a case that stirred the country back in April 2022. Hana Bednarzová, a stylistics teacher, denied Russia’s invasion of Ukraine during a class, claimed that “nothing is happening” in Kyiv, and called ČT1, a public television channel, “controlled by George Soros.”

The teacher justified Russia’s actions against Ukraine and called Ukrainian soldiers “Nazis” who “remove skin from alive people and kill children.” Bednarzová also claimed that “the Russians have been killed in Donbas since 2014.”

When 13- to 14-year-old students objected, she dismissed their arguments, citing “edited footage” and “media fakes.”

Bednarzová was fired in May 2022. She tried to sue for reinstatement but failed. During the trial, she did not retract her words and even claimed that “everything about the war is a lie.”

The judge emphasized that the teacher exploited the trust of underage students, who could not critically assess her statements, a key point in the conviction.

Bednarzová called the case a “political witch hunt” and announced plans to run for parliament with the pro-Russian Stačilo! movement, which advocates lifting sanctions on Russia and Belarus.

Earlier, a Czech citizen who joined the Russian Armed Forces contacted Czech diplomats for help, said Daniel Dreik, the spokesperson for the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Russian forces increasingly rely on poorly equipped infantry assaults, often described as “meat-grinder” attacks. Its leadership often sends waves of infantry soldiers into fire with minimal artillery or drone support, resulting in heavy casualties.

“Russia rejoices,” wrote the pro-European Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on X this week. He was referring to a joint appearance onstage in Warsaw of George Simion, the far right presidential candidate in Romania, and his Polish equivalent Karol Nawrocki just days before elections in both countries. 

On May 18, Romanians will vote in the second and final round of elections to pick their president, with Simion, a decisive first round winner, the favourite, albeit current polling shows he is running neck-and-neck with his opponent Nicusor Dan, the relatively liberal current mayor of Bucharest. Also on that day, the first round of Poland’s presidential elections will take place. Nawrocki, analysts suggest, is likely to lose to the more liberal Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski. 

But Simion’s appearance in Warsaw did cause anger, with one Polish member of the European parliament describing both candidates as representatives of “Putin’s international”. Simion denies being pro-Kremlin, but wants to stop military aid to Ukraine. An ultranationalist, he promotes the rebuilding of a greater Romania, raising the prospect of potential territorial disputes with Ukraine, Moldova, and Bulgaria. Indeed, he is already banned from entering both Moldova and Ukraine. 

Rather than Russia, the association Simion prefers to acknowledge is with Donald Trump and MAGA. As he said of his visit to Poland and support for Nawrocki, “Together, we could become two pro-MAGA presidents committed to reviving our partnership with the United States and strengthening stability along NATO’s eastern flank.”

Certainly, Simion’s MAGA love was on show during the first round of Romania’s election on May 4, and MAGA reciprocated that love. 

At the party’s Bucharest headquarters, on a warm, triumphant election night, with Simion having won over 40% of the votes, a MAGA hat-wearing American took to the podium. He asked the cheering crowd if they wanted their own "Trump hat", and threw one (and only one) towards a section chanting "MAGA, MAGA, MAGA." Brian Brown, a prominent conservative activist, was in his element, expressing solidarity with jubilant Simion supporters. 

"You, my friends," he said, "are in the eye of the storm. What happens in this country will define what happens all over Europe. And Americans know it and more and more are waking up to the truth that we must stand together. We must never be silenced." Meanwhile, a protester screaming “fascists” was quickly removed. 

Brown, who leads the anti-LGBTQ group International Organization for the Family and has been described by human rights organizations as an "infamous exporter of hate and vocal Putin supporter," was celebrating a seismic political shift. In response to Simion’s large first round victory, Romania's prime minister resigned. His own party's establishment candidate didn’t even make it to the May 18 second round. 

Simion, a 38-year-old Eurosceptic and self-described "Trumpist," had founded his far-right nationalist party, Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) just over a decade ago. At the AUR offices on election night – with Simion himself only appearing by video – Brown drew explicit parallels between Romania's situation and that of America, extolling the "friendship of true Romanians and true Americans, people that stand together against a lie." Right wing leaders in other countries echoed the sentiment. Italy's deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, for instance, declared on social media that Romanians had "finally voted, freely, with their heads and hearts." 

Romania's election became a right wing cause célèbre after the Constitutional Court annulled the presidential polls in December last year, ruling that it had been vitiated by a Russian influence operation. U.S. vice president JD Vance accused Romania of canceling the election based on “flimsy suspicions” and Elon Musk described the head of the Constitutional Court as a “tyrant”. This is why MAGA supporters took a keen interest in the May 4 do-over. It was, according to  Brown, a litmus test for freedom, for the voters’ right to choose their president, no matter how unpalatable he might be to the establishment. 

In November, 2024, far-right candidate Călin Georgescu won the first round of Romania’s presidential elections. The polls were scuppered though after intelligence revealed irregularities in campaign funding and that Russia had been involved in the setting up of almost 800 TikTok accounts backing Georgescu’s candidacy. He was also barred from participating in the rerun.

Distrust and disapproval of Romania’s political system have been growing ever since. When I got to Bucharest, my taxi driver, the first person I met, told me he wouldn’t even bother voting in the rerun. The ban on Georgescu was portrayed in right wing circles as anti-democratic. And the support he received from leading Trump administration figures such as Vance was in keeping with their support for far-right parties across Europe. 

Before Friedrich Merz won a contentious parliamentary vote to become German Chancellor, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Germany was a “tyranny in disguise” because its intelligence services classified the anti-immigration AfD, now Germany’s main opposition party, as “confirmed right wing extremist[s].” Vance said the “bureaucrats” were trying to destroy “the most popular party in Germany.” It proved, he added, that decades after the West brought down the Berlin Wall, the German establishment had “rebuilt” it. The outspoken nature of this intervention in the internal politics of an ally shows that the Trump administration would rather maintain ideological ties with far-right parties in Europe than follow traditional diplomatic protocols. 

Simion, for his part, has said that he’s a natural ally of the U.S. Republican Party, and that AUR is “almost perfectly aligned ideologically with the MAGA movement.” Just two weeks before the Romanian elections, Brian Brown met with Simion and his wife in Washington, D.C., with both men propagating their affinity to “the free world” and “Judeo-Christian legacy” in an Instagram video. Simion is also currently being scrutinized over attempts to hire a lobbying firm in the U.S. for $1.5 million to secure meetings with key American political figures and media appearances with U.S. journalists. 

In Romania, the president has a semi-executive role that comes with considerable powers over foreign policy, national security, defence spending and judicial appointments. The Romanian president also represents the country on the international stage and can veto important EU votes – a level of influence that might be considered handy on the other side of the Atlantic too.

The fact that both U.S. and other European far-right leaders came in person to offer their support to Simion after the first round of the election, or paid obeisance online, shows how it’s becoming increasingly important for the far-right to to be seen as a coherent, global force. As Brown put it in Bucharest: “We need MAGA and MEGA. Make America great again. Make Europe great again.” 

With Canada and Australia swinging to the center-left in their recent elections – in what many have called “the Trump slump” – the Romanian election offers Trump and MAGA hope that it can continue to remake the world in its own image. The irony is that MAGA, with its global offshoots, is arguably the most effective contemporary international solidarity movement, despite railing against globalism and being so apparently parochial in its outlook. 

A version of this story was published in last week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Bucharest Calling: MAGA goes on tour appeared first on Coda Story.

Last week, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to right wing influencer Ben Shapiro, founder of "The Daily Wire". The interview showed how much stock Zelensky puts in speaking to a MAGA and Republican audience. It is with this audience that Zelensky has little credibility and Ukraine little sympathy, as Donald Trump calls for a quick peace deal, even if it means Ukraine ceding vast swathes of territory to the Russian aggressor. Zelensky needs Shapiro to combat conservative apathy about the fate of Ukraine, and combat its admiration and respect for Putin as a supposed bastion of traditional values and religious belief. 

Two questions into the interview, Shapiro confronts Zelensky with a conservative talking point. Is Ukraine persecuting members of the Russian Orthodox Church? It is a view that is frequently aired in Christian conservative circles in the United States. Just two months ago, Tucker Carlson interviewed Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer representing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Amsterdam alleged that USAID, or some other U.S. government-sponsored organization, created an alternative orthodox church "that would be completely free of what they viewed as the dangerous Putin influence." This, Amsterdam said, is a violation of the U.S. commitment to religious freedom. Trump-supporting talking heads have frequently described Ukraine as killing Christians, while Vladimir Putin is described as a defender of traditional Christian values.

On April 22, Putin met with the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church and Patriarch Kirill, his Russian counterpart. The Serbian Patriarch told the Russian president that when he met with the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the latter said "we, the Orthodox, have one trump card... Vladimir Putin." It was the Serbian Orthodox Church's desire, the Patriarch said, that "if there is a new geopolitical division, we should be... in the Russian world." It is Orthodoxy's perceived political, rather than purely spiritual, link to Russia that the Ukrainian parliament was hoping to sever in August last year by passing legislation to ban religious groups with links to Moscow.

The Russian orthodox church, which is almost fully under Kremlin’s control, is one of Moscow’s most potent tools for interfering in the domestic affairs of post-Soviet countries. Its ties to Russian intelligence are well-documented and run deep. Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, spent the 1970s spying for the KGB in Switzerland. Today, he blesses Russian weapons and soldiers before they’re deployed to Ukraine.

While Christian conservatives in the U.S. accuse Ukraine of violating religious freedoms and "killing" Christians, Zelensky says that it is, in fact, Russian forces that are persecuting Ukrainian Christians. On Easter, Zelensky said 67 clergymen had been "killed or tortured by Russian occupiers" and over 600 Christian religious sites destroyed. I spoke to the Emmy-winning journalist Simon Ostrovsky who said Russia targets Christian denominations.

"If we're talking about an evangelical church," he told me, "then the members of the church will be accused of being American spies. And if we're talking about the Ukrainian Catholic Church, they'll consider it to be a Nazi Church.” But, Ostrovsky added, "Russians have been able to communicate a lot more effectively than Ukraine, particularly to the right in the United States. Russia has been able to. make the case that it is in fact the Ukrainians who are suppressing freedom of religion in Ukraine and not the Russians, which is absurd."

Back in 2013, Pat Buchanan, an influential commentator and former Reagan staffer, asked if Putin was "one of us." That is, a U.S.-style conservative taking up arms in the "culture war for mankind's future". It is a perception Putin has successfully exploited, able to position himself as the lone bulwark against Western and "globalist" decadence. Now with Trump in the White House, propelled there by Christian conservative support, which has stayed steadfastly loyal to the president even as other conservatives question policies such as tariffs and deportations without due process. With the Christian right as Trump's chief constituency, how can he negotiate with Putin free of their natural affinity for the president not just of Russia but arguably traditional Christianity?

The battle over religious freedom in Ukraine is not just a local concern – it’s a global information war, where narratives crafted in Moscow find eager amplifiers among U.S. Christian conservatives. By painting Ukraine as a persecutor of Christians and positioning Russia as the last defender of “traditional values,” the Kremlin has successfully exported its cultural propaganda to the West. This has already had real-world consequences: shaping U.S. policy debates, undermining support for Ukraine, and helping authoritarian leaders forge alliances across borders. The case of Ukraine shows how religious identity can be weaponized as a tool of soft power, blurring the line between faith and geopolitics, and revealing how easily domestic debates can be hijacked for foreign influence. In a world where the persecutors pose as the persecuted, understanding how narratives are manipulated is essential to defending both democracy and genuine religious freedom.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

The post The Christian right’s persecution complex appeared first on Coda Story.

Jaeson Jones is trained as a cop—not a journalist. Yet the 51-year-old holds a lucrative correspondent contract at one of the country’s most prominent MAGA-aligned television networks. Jones began his police career as a jailer in Hays County, south of Austin, before becoming a narcotics agent and later a captain in the intelligence and counterterrorism unit in the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). After a nearly 30-year career, he retired in 2016. Then, alongside an increasing number of former police and federal agents, Jones sought stardom as a right-wing influencer while cultivating ties with Donald Trump.

Jones’ efforts began in 2017 with a YouTube channel, where he pitched himself as a “nationally recognized authority on border security and transnational crimes.” His one-man show, Tripwires and Triggers, lacked sophisticated production. Early videos featured primitive graphics, poor lighting, and awkward jump cuts. Many received fewer than 500 views. 

Then, in 2019, Jones landed a gig with Breitbart, a Trump-aligned media outlet that hired him to write about border security. Around that time, he met Lara Logan, an Emmy Award winner and former CBS correspondent who has become a darling of the MAGA-sphere. She interviewed Jones for her show, Lara Logan Has No Agenda, before being let go from Fox News after comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to a sadistic Nazi doctor.

Soon, the former lawman, despite his rudimentary Spanish, was being regularly featured as an expert on Mexican drug cartels on primetime Fox News programs, including Tucker Carlson’s show. In 2021, he became a correspondent for Newsmax, a once-fringe Fox rival that grew into a MAGA media powerhouse following the 2020 election. In June, a Reuters Institute study found that 8 percent of Americans—about 25 million—consulted Newsmax at least weekly. (That’s about the same number who report reading the Wall Street Journal weekly. Its online-only reach is similar to NPR’s, the same study showed.) 

As a Newsmax correspondent, Jones hasn’t always nailed the details in his reporting, often misspelling words and names. In one broadcast, his graphics misidentified Bubba Shelton—the sheriff of McMullen County—as the sheriff of “McAllen County” (McAllen is a Texas border city, not a county). In the title of a recent YouTube video, Jones misspelled Lukeville, Arizona—an unincorporated community on the international border and one of the state’s only ports of entry—as “Luthville.”

But, in MAGA-aligned media, it seems to be consistent political messaging that matters—not specifics. As a former DPS officer, Jones enjoys favorable treatment from the state police agency, including access to helicopters and police intelligence of which other journalists could only dream. He often features DPS helicopters, aircraft hangars, or personnel in movie trailer-style videos. In one video on his YouTube channel, Jones totes a large bundle of seized drugs on his shoulder, transporting the illicit goods from a DPS helicopter to a U.S. Border Patrol pickup. In another, Jones runs behind a state police officer, up and down boulders and through thick brush and creosote bushes—as if he, too, is part of the law enforcement team.

During many of his dispatches, Jones wears the same brown-and-black checkered scarf as DPS airmen, from whom he regularly receives intel: The division’s head pilot, Stacy Holland, texts Jones on a regular basis, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer. (In 2012, then-captain Holland was maneuvering an agency helicopter when a trooper shot at a speeding pickup, killing two Guatemalan migrants and injuring another, according to police video obtained for a previous Observer investigation.)

Most DPS officers decline interviews, instead directing journalists to the agency’s media office, which often ignores press inquiries. Holland, on the other hand, has a close relationship with Jones, often sending him photos and videos. The exchanges show that Jones has obtained access to a stream of intelligence, including suspicious activity reports, screenshots of a helicopter’s aerial view cameras, and photos of tracking devices from a DPS computer.

Jones calls Holland “bro” and praises him for his contributions, some of which are not public information. “I like it!” Jones replied to one photo. “Anything new from the field coming in lately? We should ramp that up again.” In text conversations, the two refer to migrants as “bodies,” as if they were corpses and not living human beings.

Referring to fellow human beings as “bodies” is not unusual for Jones. On a chilly December night—a few days before Christmas 2023—Jones filmed a scene from a 47-acre park in Eagle Pass, where local children and families played baseball and soccer before the Texas National Guard turned it into a de facto military base for Governor Greg Abbott’s multi-billion dollar, multi-agency border security initiative, Operation Lone Star. That night, the park was lined with concertina wire, its entrance was barred, and the fields were filled with hundreds of migrants, most of whom had few possessions and slept on the ground under emergency blankets. “So you got big groups of bodies that come in here about every 10 to 15 minutes,” Jones said. “Every silver blanket or bump on the ground is a body,” he added, referring to asylum-seekers. 

Jones’ access to DPS and to Operation Lone Star military activities—which serve as popular Hollywood-style backdrops for “border invasion” content creators—helped put him on the radar of Trump’s allies, including Tom Homan, who was an acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Trump’s first administration and who was recently named the president-elect’s new “border czar.”

“We can just grab ’em, pick ’em up and remove ’em out of this country.”

In July 2023, Homan founded a nonprofit called Border911, and he later named Jones vice president of the organization, which included other former state and federal law enforcement officers as team members who crisscrossed the country spreading the false narrative that criminal terrorists are invading the United States at the invitation of the Biden administration and Democrats. Border911 members also received government security contracts and speaking gigs for themselves or for companies that employed them, as revealed in a prior investigation in this series. The group argued that only Trump could save America, laying the groundwork for his reelection.

Jones’ DPS contacts were crucial in this pro-Trump messaging. In Border911 videos posted on social media channels and promoted at events, Jones and Homan sweep across the Texas borderlands in state police aircraft, set to a thunderous soundtrack fit for a thriller. “Whether you like President Trump or not, you can’t argue with his success,” Homan says in one video from March 2023, before it cuts to another scene: an airplane hangar in West Texas, where he, Jones, and DPS airmen in flight gear walk in slow motion toward a helicopter.

As of early December, other Border911 team members were being considered for key positions in the incoming Trump administration, including former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, who was tapped to lead Customs and Border Protection. With Homan as incoming “border czar,” and assigned by Trump to oversee border enforcement and mass deportations, Jones is uniquely positioned to influence homeland security strategy and messaging in Texas and beyond. 

Trump and his allies have made clear that the right wing’s most extreme ideas are now on the table, from constructing deportation camps in Texas to designating Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorists.” Classifying cartels as terrorists has, in Jones’ own words, been one of his goals since retiring from DPS in 2016. For nearly two decades, some Texas Republican officials have tried to convince the federal government to make this decision, but they’ve always been rebuffed partly because it would spark conflict with Mexico, the United States’ closest trading partner. 

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University and author of Los Zetas Inc., a book about one of Mexico’s most feared drug cartels, said she does not consider Jones to be a true border authority.“He’s unknown to me. … I don’t consider him an expert,” she told the Observer. But she considers the ideas that Jones and others have espoused, including labeling cartels as foreign terrorists, to be dangerous propaganda that could well be used to justify bombings or other incursions on Mexican soil. 

In an essay for the Observer about such proposals, she wrote: “Nobody denies that extreme levels of violence and brutality in Mexico are connected with the drug trade. Something needs to be done, but deploying U.S. troops would only escalate a costly and ineffective drug war and put many innocent lives at risk.”

In the ballroom of a San Antonio Embassy Suites last October, Daniel Korus, a dean at Del Mar College in the coastal city of Corpus Christi, introduced Jones as the keynote speaker for a South Texas regional policy conference, stating that Jones had a 25-year career in border intelligence. “Now, he educates the rest of us,” said Korus, a former high-ranking naval officer.

Jones did not correct the introduction, though most of his time in the state police was actually spent in non-intelligence roles away from the border, according to DPS records. His only recorded formal DPS training course specifically on the subject was “Intelligence Gathering/Sharing/Mapping,” according to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, and he took that just a few months before his retirement. 

Nonetheless, Jones promotes himself as a border intelligence expert and profits from it. With the All American Speakers Bureau, a platform for hired experts, Jones lists himself as charging $30,000 to $50,000 per speaking gig, though Korus said Jones was paid $10,000 or less for the San Antonio appearance. 

Dressed in black leather cowboy boots and a matching suit, Jones paced in front of his audience, telling tales of the borderlands and the violence between rival organized crime groups in Mexico. “What happens there is coming here, and I’m gonna show you,” he said.

On a projector screen, Jones displayed graphic videos and told stories about drug cartel members committing lurid acts of violence in Mexico: decapitations with a fillet knife, a head bashed in with a sledgehammer, and the wiping out of most of a town. 

“These people live in Texas. We have been dealing with this for many years—but you have not been told,” Jones warned, before moving to the next PowerPoint slide.

Throughout his presentation, a table full of sheriffs in cowboy hats nodded along in agreement as others in the ballroom gasped at the violent scenes. Twice, he paused to ask the audience some version of the question: “Is this a drug trafficking organization—or is this a terrorist organization?”

He told the audience what the foreign terrorist designation would accomplish: expedited investigations into bad actors that would allow police to skirt due process protections, to obtain more resources, and to freeze more organized crime organizations’ assets abroad.

“We’re gonna take this country back.”

Jones has repeated similar arguments in various venues, including a hearing of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, Newsmax, the Dr. Phil show, and Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox News.

To Jones, the most important aspect of the foreign terrorist label seems to be that it could enable hastened deportations for people in any way associated with Mexican drug cartels. “You can’t be a terrorist in our country,” he told Dr. Phil last year. “We can just grab ’em, pick ’em up and remove ’em out of this country, and go after ’em anywhere in the world, and that’s what we really need to do.”

But many of his assertions about the foreign terrorist designation—a process codified in federal law and overseen by the U.S. Department of State—are incorrect, according to experts interviewed by the Observer. Some actions Jones described can already be taken by the government without the foreign terrorist label, such as freezing assets, said former State Department official Jason Blazakis. Whether a suspect is affiliated with a foreign terrorist organization or another criminal network, individuals have a right to due process, he added.

“I think he doesn’t understand how terrorism investigations work,” Blazakis said. “He’s trying to make the designation look like some kind of special panacea.”

During his speech, Jones also informed the audience that the cartels deploy a threat, “plato y plumo”—a misstatement of “plata o plomo” that changes the meaning from a menacing choice between a bribe or a bullet to a perplexing offer of a plate and a nonsense word.

Jones emphasizes different credentials depending on his audience. Sometimes he speaks as a correspondent for Newsmax, and other times as a member of Border911. In legislative settings, he often emphasizes his DPS career, such as when he advocated designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations at a press conference outside the Arizona Capitol. (Representative Steve Montenegro introduced a related bill about a week later.) 

Much of Jones’ work for Newsmax relies on strategically edited footage, meant to portray the border as a frightening place and asylum-seekers as criminal invaders.

Last January, volunteers at a humanitarian camp for asylum-seekers near the border in the unincorporated community of Sasabe, Arizona, were surprised to see Jones roll up with a cameraman. As shown in footage aired by Newsmax and separate videos a volunteer provided to the Observer, Jones was accompanied by armed and masked men from Mayhem Solutions Group, a private security firm, who flanked him as he recorded his content. The Mayhem men were mostly dressed in military fatigues, and some wore hats with patches bearing the insignia of Texas DPS Intelligence and Counterterrorism—the division Jones worked in before retiring. 

The appearance of these men in Arizona puzzled the volunteers, especially when the arrivals claimed to be part of a state or federal “task force.” One volunteer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the armed Mayhem personnel left asylum-seekers with the impression that they were police because they wore tactical vests and patches emblazoned with the word “investigator.” Those armed men said they had been hired to collect information, and they “were going around telling people that they were obligated to give them their information, implying that they were a federal agency,” the volunteer said, as previously reported in The Border Chronicle, on the day the men came to the camp. “They said multiple times that they were going to citizen’s arrest us if we tried to interfere with what they were doing, and that they would bring the U.S. forces in if we didn’t step aside.” 

Meanwhile, Jones continued to film, the volunteer said. “While these guys were intimidating people, he was talking about all ‘these illegals invading the country.’” 

When volunteers asked Jones about his armed companions, he provided little information. “I’m with Newsmax,” the volunteer recalled him saying. “You guys are doing your thing. We’re doing ours.” 

The Observer reached the founder of Mayhem Solutions Group, but he claimed he did not know Jones. A state contract database and public records requests show that Mayhem Solutions Group has never held a contract with Texas DPS. The agency did not respond to a request for comment about the security company employees wearing DPS insignia on their hats. The federal Department of Homeland Security stated it held no formal agreement with the company. 

In some settings, Jones introduces himself as CEO of Omni Intelligence, which he founded in 2017. The company has been described by the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation as a provider of “intelligence and analytics services to government agencies and media.” Omni Intelligence has no website, and its business address has alternated between rental homes and P.O. boxes across Central Texas. (Letters sent to two of his business addresses were returned as undeliverable.)

A search of public records revealed one Omni customer: No Greater Love, a nonprofit based in Wimberley that says it educates “millions of Americans daily about the truth of open borders” and holds occasional teach-ins for doomsday preppers at a local Veterans of Foreign Wars post. Over a two-year period, the group paid Omni Intelligence $45,000, according to its IRS Form 990 tax filings. Its website heavily features Jones’ video content. 

It is unclear if Omni has any employees, aside from Jones’ personal assistant, who lives in the Philippines. 

One of the firm’s former unpaid consultants was Ammon Blair, a recently retired Border Patrol agent. Blair was also featured in one of Jones’ YouTube videos and on Newsmax. While still at Border Patrol, Blair said he passed intelligence to Jones, and one of those stories went “viral.” 

Jones did not respond to repeated requests, via email, letter, and phone for an interview for this story. He also denied a request made in person at the San Antonio conference, saying he was unavailable that day and for the following several weeks, but that he might have time later. Jones never replied to the Observer’s subsequent inquiries.

Last April, Jones appeared with Homan and Trump at the now-president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago Club during a fundraising gala for Border911. As Homan’s sidekick, Jones has identified allies among sheriffs at the border and beyond, as well as other county and state officials who could support and potentially financially benefit from Trump’s mass deportation plans. 

In Arizona, Jones describes Pinal County Sheriff (and failed U.S. Senate candidate) Mark Lamb as a “close friend,” and Jones once embedded with Lamb’s agency for a week. Jones also moderated a panel including Lamb and Mark Dannels, a right-wing border sheriff who has referred to deporting undocumented people as a “cleanup.” In Texas, Jones spoke at a rally with Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, whose department has collaborated with vigilante groups, stocked up on pepperball guns to shoot migrants, and sued the Biden administration over immigration policy. 

In Florida, Jones found another powerful ally: Richard Mantei, a state prosecutor who helped lead a year-and-a-half-long grand jury investigation, a non-criminal probe of policies to address illegal immigration. Records show Mantei sent Jones money via Venmo for “Florida expenses” last fall. (The Florida Attorney General’s Office said it lacked records of any related invoice or receipt, and it refused to release any affidavits or grand jury testimony records signed by Jones.) When the same grand jury completed its final policy recommendations, Mantei emailed the document to Homan.

In some video clips, Jones appears as Homan’s right-hand man. Homan often heralds Jones as a premier border expert because of his DPS experience. At a January 2023 press conference outside the Arizona Capitol, Homan introduced Jones as a good friend and a top authority on crime and the drug trade, after citing Jones’ DPS career.

“I’m gonna walk around the country with these men here in this organization,” says Homan in one of Border911’s signature trailers from March 2023, over footage of himself, Jones, and DPS airmen near an agency helicopter, “and educate American people on why the border is a disaster.”

At times Jones appears to have also coached DPS airmen on how—and when—to take videos so he could better use the footage. “Hey, being advised you may have up to 2,000 surging the border in El Paso bro,” Jones wrote to Holland, the chief DPS pilot, in March 2023. “Can you get some video from helicopter ASAP?” In iMessages to Holland in February 2024, he praised state police for the videos they provided. One reads: “Tell the crew great job for me. Best field production of all time.”

In a September 2023 message, Jones invited DPS to steer the narrative he portrays on Newsmax. “I’ll run it Monday,” he replied to a message from Holland. “Anything you want me to say specifically?” 

Holland and his airmen have apparently returned the favor for Jones’ flattering coverage by furnishing him with the backdrops for his propaganda videos. In one January 2024 clip, Jones and Homan walk perfectly framed between two DPS aircraft on a tarmac at sunset in West Texas, with mountains in the background.

“You know Tom, this border, it’s gotta get fixed. It’s absolutely unsustainable,” Jones says solemnly, walking beside Homan with the sunset as a backdrop, the sky painted in hues of blue and purple.

Homan responds matter-of-factly: He wakes up every morning pissed off, but at least they’ve got Border911. “We’re gonna take this country back, we’re gonna secure the border, we’re gonna protect our national security,” Homan says. 

“We’re not going to get rich doing it,” he adds, not mentioning how Jones and other members of Border911 have already benefited from various government contracts and speaking gigs.

“But what a team we built.”

The post The Border Propagandist appeared first on Coda Story.

Later this month, on February 23, Germany goes to the polls. Already it seems as if the wall that mainstream German parties had erected between their more sober, responsible politics and the provocations of the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) has crumbled. Thousands of Germans protested in cities across the country against the apparent willingness of the center-right Christian Democratic Union – the party most expect will win the election and provide the next German chancellor – to accept AfD backing for its bid to block undocumented migrants at the border.  

AfD has become a serious threat to Germany’s political establishment, with its leader Alice Weidel even leading the race  in one recent poll to become the country’s next chancellor. Weidel, a once obscure figure, enjoys the very loud and prominent support of Elon Musk, who interviewed her for over an hour on X last month and appeared at an AfD rally via video link last week to tell the crowd that there was “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt. “ He exhorted AfD supporters to “be proud of German culture and German values and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” 

Many AfD members have in the past called for an end to Germany’s “cult of guilt” over the Holocaust. And Weidel herself, while endorsing that phrase, has said German politics should not be about its past but about “confidence and responsibility for the future.”

When Musk told thousands of Germans they need to "move beyond" Nazi guilt, I reached out to Erica Hellerstein, a brilliant reporter who has spent months investigating Germany's complex relationship with historical memory. In 2023, her story for Coda dived into  the little-understood opposition to Holocaust remembrance inside Germany. 

"What's interesting to me is seeing that view migrate from the fringe of German society to one of the most powerful shadow politicians in the US," Erica told me.

"Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents," Musk declared to cheering AfD supporters, just hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Musk’s own grandfather was reportedly a pro-apartheid, antisemitic conspiracy theorist in South Africa - another country that, like Germany, has been celebrated for its post-conflict reconciliation efforts.

To understand today's shifting power dynamics, you have to understand how leaders manipulate our view of the past. The battle over historical memory has become one of the most potent weapons of modern authoritarianism, though it often goes unnoticed in daily headlines. Whether in school textbooks, political speeches, or family stories, the rewriting of history isn't really about the past at all. It's about who gets to control the future. 

No one understands this better than Vladimir Putin, who has written the playbook that authoritarians around the world are now following: Close the archives. Rewrite textbooks. Silence historians. Transform perpetrators into heroes.

What makes this tactic so effective is how stealthily it works at first. The rewriting of history begins in intimate spaces - in family silences, in selective remembrance, in subtle shifts of narrative.

We sent Erica to Germany in the wake of America's racial justice protests because we wanted to understand what Europe's model for historical reconciliation could teach a nation grappling with its own buried past. What Erica uncovered was revealing: even as Germans publicly embraced their culture of remembrance, many maintained a studied silence about their own family histories during the Nazi era - much like the buried stories of racial violence she found reporting across the American South. It was in these intimate gaps between public commemoration and private amnesia that she found the seeds of today's shift.

"Silence distorts memory..." wrote Erica Hellerstein in Coda nearly three years ago. She had traveled to Germany to report on its lauded culture of remembrance. Now with Elon Musk telling Germans to move on from their guilt, Erica's prescient piece reminds us why we must interrogate the horrors of history so as not to repeat them in the future. READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

"I don't think it's particularly surprising that someone with Musk's particular brand of grievance politics would gravitate to the AfD's brand of grievance politics," Erica told me, "but it does make me wonder if it will give license to other authoritarian movements to more vocally reject movements to reconcile with the past."

It’s already happening: Argentina's new president Javier Milei is actively whitewashing the country’s brutal period of dictatorship in the late-1970s and early-1980s. And in Hungary, historical revisionism has been essential to Viktor Orbán maintaining his grip on power.  While, in the United States, conservative politicians continue to rail against the 1619 Project and any attempt to teach accurate history in schools.

In Russia, where 70% approve of Stalin's role in Russian history, nearly half of young people say they've never heard of the Great Terror. Years before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine we saw how the Putin regime began to implement its meticulous, systematic erasure of Soviet crimes: “cleansing” history books, culture, music, film, media.  By rewriting the past, Putin's regime cleared the way for future atrocities. When he finally declared Ukraine's statehood a historical fiction in 2022, the groundwork had been laid over decades of perpetuating carefully constructed historical myths. 

Now, as Musk amplifies a view that was once barely whispered in German living rooms, we're seeing  the results of the same erosion of historical memory burst into the mainstream. It’s evident in the support for extreme right wing groups across Europe,

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is how it weaponizes a very human impulse - the desire to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths about our past. As one Gulag survivor told us, of wrestling with this challenge in Russia: "How do you hold people accountable when there are millions of interrogators, millions of informants, millions of prison guards... These millions were also our people."

This selective amnesia creates exactly the kind of buried tension and grievance that authoritarians exploit. From Moscow to Buenos Aires, from Mississippi to Munich, we see how silence about the past can pave the way for power grabs in the present. When Musk aligns himself with Germany's far right, he's not just making an inflammatory speech - he's giving global legitimacy to a movement that understands what Putin has long known: controlling society’s memory is the key to controlling society.

Today, as we witness what Erica calls "the global ripple effect of this kind of embrace of a once-taboo interpretation of history," I'm struck by how the grand sweep of politics often begins in the quiet spaces of our homes. 

The stories we tell our children, the silences we maintain at family gatherings, the questions we dare or don't dare to ask about our ancestors - these intimate choices extend outward, shaping not just our personal narratives but our collective future. 

As Erica put it: “I think it’s so important to start with our family stories - because over time, memory gaps can mutate into memory wars.” And so, perhaps our most important task begins at our dinner tables: facing up to the stories we've been afraid to tell.

The post To control the future, rewrite the past appeared first on Coda Story.

Among Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders, all signed in the first week of his new term, perhaps the one with the most far-reaching impact was also one of the least talked about and scrutinized. For 90 days, the United States said, it would freeze all its global aid programs, except for “foreign military financing for Israel and Egypt.” There were no exceptions announced for the billions of dollars the U.S. gives to health programs in Africa each year, including funding to a crucial AIDS relief program that provides anti-viral medications to some 20 million people in 55 countries. 

And that’s without counting the cost of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization which has particularly serious implications for Africa. Eventually, Marco Rubio, the new U.S. secretary of state, walked back some of the order, saying exceptions would be made for “life-saving aid” including HIV treatments.

Despite Rubio’s clarification that essential aid would be granted a “humanitarian waiver,” many aid workers said they hadn’t yet been told whether they could resume operations, having already been told to cease operations last week. In Uganda alone, an estimated 1.2 million people would have been affected by the withdrawal of funds from AIDS relief. The Ugandan-born executive director of UNAIDS, Winnie Byanyima said that the United States’  “unwavering commitment to addressing HIV stands as a global gold standard of leadership.” If Trump continued to back AIDS relief, she added, the U.S. could effectively “end AIDS by 2030.” 

But few Ugandan politicians expressed any anger or even disappointment in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s blanket order to freeze funding. On X, human rights activist, Hillary Innocent Taylor Seguya asked “where is the outrage?” Months before, he had told me how the autocratic Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni’s government monitored social media posts and sometimes used online criticism as grounds to arrest activists.  

By contrast, in August, 2023, when the World Bank decided to suspend new public financing to Uganda, Museveni himself took to social media. The World Bank made its decision in the wake of Uganda’s “Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2023” which sought to “prohibit any form of sexual relations between persons of the same sex” and to “prohibit the promotion or recognition of sexual relations between persons of the same sex.” 

The range of punishments included life imprisonment and even the death penalty. For LGBT activist Hans Senfuma, the passage of the act into Ugandan law turned his nightmare into reality “It essentially gives the go-ahead to attack those who are assumed to be LGBTQ+,” he said, explaining that he himself now lived a life of secrecy, rarely leaving his apartment for fear even of his own neighbors.

It is, posted Museveni, “unfortunate that the World Bank and other actors dare to want to coerce us into abandoning our faith, culture, principles and sovereignty, using money.” Uganda, he added, “does not need pressure from anybody to know how to solve problems in our society. They are our problems.” Later that year, Joe Biden suspended Uganda from a group of African countries granted special duty free access to the US for specified products.

With the election of Trump, Uganda sees an opportunity to return to the fold. “We are going to start engaging with the new administration as soon as possible,” said Vincent Waiswa Bagiire, a senior foreign ministry official. “The tone which His Excellency Trump has set is favorable.” Over a five-year period, it was estimated that Uganda’s anti-LGBTQ law would cost it over $8 billion. But with Trump having signed his own anti-LGBTQ executive orders, the Ugandan government sees him as a likely ally, as someone who shares their values. 

Trump has used his executive power to restore U.S. participation in global anti-abortion pacts to deny millions of women around the world access to contraception and safe abortions. It’s a stance that puts the United States in league with Hungary, Russia and extreme theocracies.

Indeed, as The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported, Valerie Huber, a former adviser to the Trump administration, has been traveling across Africa soliciting government investment in her sex education programs. Huber, TBIJ noted, is the “driving force behind the Geneva Consensus Declaration, a statement signed by 34 countries saying that there is ‘no international right to abortion.’” 

Trump’s executive order commits the United States to recognizing “two sexes, male and female” which are apparently “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” This has emboldened anti-LGBT activists across the continent. In Ghana, for instance, a bill has been proposed to imprison people for “identifying” as LGBT or funding LGBT groups. While the new Ghanaian president John Mahama, who like Trump was inaugurated in January, says the bill is “effectively dead on procedural grounds,” activists have been pushing for its passage into law. “With Donald Trump’s return,” said one activist, “Ghana is on the right side of history.”

In a paper commissioned by the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education in September, the researcher Malayah Harper assessed the global ramifications of the implementation of Project 2025 proposals. Project 2025, she argued, “calls for an end to using U.S. diplomatic soft power in Africa to protect the rights of LGBTQ+ communities, and refers to this diplomacy as ‘imposing pro-LGBT initiatives.” Connected to this, is the conservative desire for Trump to pull the plug on U.S. funds for foreign organizations that promote or provide abortions. 

And Trump has done exactly that, using his executive power to restore U.S. participation in global anti-abortion pacts to deny millions of women around the world, including in Africa, access to contraception and safe abortions. Significantly, while speaking of the government’s “humanitarian waiver,” Rubio made sure to say exemptions did not apply to abortion, family planning, transgender surgeries, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. It’s a stance that puts the United States in league with Hungary, Russia and extreme theocracies.

It is a key trope of Russian propaganda that homosexuality is a decadent Western concept. Russia, the Kremlin insists, is the last bastion of traditional family values, a pitch which has resonated with conservative communities everywhere. Now that the U.S. is following along the same path, the effect on women’s health could be catastrophic. 

Also, as Trump retreats from public health initiatives in Africa and elsewhere, it leaves the door open for others, particularly China to step in and reshape global alliances to its benefit. Anna Reismann, the Country Director for Uganda and South Sudan at Konrad-Adenaur-Stiftung, a foundation associated with the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, a major center-right political party, told me that dropping aid funding only fueled anti-Western narratives. “It plays to sentiments against colonialism and paternalistic behaviors of Western powers," she said. In other words, the vacuum left by the U.S. would be filled by China, Russia and other non-Western powers that do not impose human rights conditions on funding. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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