Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie: Atilla Hallsby on Secrets, Conspiracy, and Power in U.S. Politics

From political scandals to conspiracy theories about hidden government power, secrecy seems to define modern American politics. In “Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie,” Assistant Professor Atilla Hallsby argues that these moments don’t simply reveal hidden truths but also follow familiar patterns that help sustain existing systems of power.

Tell us about your publication. What should readers understand about your main argument?

“Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie” makes the case for attending to the secret as a recurring pattern animating political discourse in the United States. It may seem like secrets have lost their popular appeal given the brazenness of political violence and corruption. Even so, U.S. political discourse remains dominated by the secret. The news is often packaged as scandal, data leaks are more frequent, and conspiracy theories promise access to hidden truths. While it’s tempting to think of secrets as isolated pieces of hidden knowledge tied to specific events, my book argues that the secret is a recurring form that follows familiar patterns across political contexts.

The secret is socially promiscuous and morally ambivalent. It creates a sense of intimacy within communities while also providing cover for undemocratic acts said to protect democracy. I argue that the secret exists within and as a function of discourse. In discourse, it points to a hidden “beyond” located in archives or between the lines of inscrutable texts. But the secret of discourse is also an open secret as there is no singular hidden truth, only shifts in perspective that reshape what is already in plain sight.

The longer arc of “Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie” features four rhetorical variations on the secret’s form: the scandal, the dog whistle, the leaker, and the detective. These forms give the title its structure: sovereign power through scandal, the settler through detective narratives, the leaker through the sexualization of national security disclosures, and the lie through racist dog whistle politics. Moving from George W. Bush to Joe Biden, the book serves as a prelude to present-day political discourse, whose function is to remind us that we do not, or cannot, know.

You frame these patterns as continuously unfolding. How do you see these forms of secrecy shaping or affecting the future of U.S. politics?

These forms stretch across time. They were there long before any of us were born and will likely outlast us. Recognizing their long lifespan illuminates how the present status quo is the result of accidents, ruptures, and repetitions. This means that things don’t have to be this way and the secret is neither universal nor eternal, even  if it currently appears to be coextensive with the so-called American way of life. 

Form also reveals how the anti-democratic character of the secret is intensifying. The 2016 and 2024 Republican presidential campaigns were marked by dogwhistles that targeted Mexican migrants and Haitian refugees. Those dogwhistles – minimally coded speech that functions as a password for those who identify with “America First” exceptionalism – have escalated into explicit attacks upon any person whose race, ethnicity, or gender does not conform to regressive imaginings of a primordially white, male, heterosexual, and cisgender nation. Unauthorized disclosures, such as the 2024 Discord leak and the 2025 “Signalgate” scandal, suggest the president’s weakening control over appointees and policy. Routine deployments of Homeland Security agents in Minnesota and beyond have the familiar presence of the secret police. Finally, artificial intelligence accelerates the creation of infrastructure-targeting cyberweapons and the threat of nuclear war, while chatbots and deepfakes exacerbate the paranoid conspiracy theorist’s suspicion that nothing is real.

Rhetoric is the thread connecting secrecy’s past, present, and future. Just as World War II-era Americans knew “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” we now encounter phrases like “See Something, Say Something.” At the level of form, rhetoric is more than talk as it assumes the shape of repeating tropes. Scandals begin with repetitions of absent evidence before escalating into caesurae, or empty places where the public can accumulate their suspicions about political maleficence. Racist dogwhistles brandish cruelty via irony and catachresis, to take the form of aloof and abusive misnaming. Massive disclosures from Julian Assange to Jeffrey Epstein evoke the false, masculine pretense of megethos, implying that bigger leaks will result in more impactful awakenings. These political realities will continue to intensify unless we learn to recognize and challenge them.

What first drew you to studying secrecy, surveillance, and rhetoric? Was there a specific political moment or case that piqued your interest?

Secrets are relatable because they are personal and political. Our relationships with family, friends, and communities are shaped by secrecy, just as events on the global stage are marked by similar dynamics.

The same is true for me. I wrote this book with the period just before and after 9/11 in mind. The turn of the century saw the passage of the Patriot Act, the suspicion of Dick Cheney as George W. Bush’s shadow president, and a largely disavowed climate of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim rhetoric in the United States. Between 1997 and 2004, an interdisciplinary field known as secrecy studies also emerged, before being overtaken by surveillance studies.

While surveillance remains an important and expanding field, earlier conversations around secrecy still deserve attention. Secrecy studies brought together scholars from science and technology, law, rhetoric, history, media, and cultural studies to examine how secrecy shapes knowledge production, historical narratives, and anti-democratic governance. At the same time, scholars of race and gender were developing new ways of understanding the epistemology of the closet, subaltern publics, Black enclaves, and political fugitivity.

These conversations are re-entwined in “Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie.” The current state of U.S. political rhetoric grows out of that earlier moment, and those same debates remain essential for understanding and navigating our present. 

What’s next for you?

My next book-length project builds from an article I published in a 2024 issue of “Rhetoric Society Quarterly,” titled “A Copious Void: Rhetoric as Artificial Intelligence 1.0.” It develops a humanistic approach to artificial intelligence similar to the one I bring to the secret in “Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie.” Beyond the secrecy of the “black box” of large language models, the motivations of AI developers, and the financial systems that keep this technology in the public foreground, the secret and artificial intelligence share deeper parallels. Both are framed as universal and inevitable, shaping how we understand the world while appearing inextricable from it. Both also function as vanishing points for human agency, seeming to displace human production, interpretation, and knowledge-making.

If classified information has long overshadowed openly available knowledge, then the consumptive patterns of LLMs – that is, the consumption of language, labor, natural resources, and capital – produce epistemic simulacra that promise to displace person-centered creation and understanding with systems that serve primarily carceral and plutocratic ends. Like the secret, I want to make the case that artificial intelligence could have been otherwise, that it could still be something other than what it is: a death-driven technology obsessed with the ‘end’ of the Anthropocene and human-centered modes of production. 

Information about the Book

Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie: Forms of the Secret in US Political Rhetoric is available from the Ohio State University Press (www.ohiostatepress.org). The paperback edition is available at 30% off using the code HALLSBY.  

This story was written by Bayleigh Bergner, an undergraduate student in CLA.