In 2010 Chelsea Manning leaked the largest trove of classified documents in US military history. They included the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs, which revealed massive civilian death tolls and evidence of war crimes, and a cache of embarrassing diplomatic cables. Presenting as male and gender nonconforming while serving in the army, Manning transitioned in prison where she served 7 years of her 35-year sentence before being pardoned. Officials, reporters, and even her lawyers used Manning’s gender dysphoria to question her decision to leak. Meanwhile, according to Manning herself (in interviews), and to most of her sympathizers, the two were simply not connected: Manning just happened to be a queer whistleblower. Lida Maxwell’s marvelous new book, Insurgent Truth, makes a forceful case for the interconnectedness of Manning’s gender nonconformity and her leaks, seeing both as forms of “insurgent truth-telling” against norms of publicity and privacy. (Maxwell’s main source materials are the chat logs between Manning and Adrian Lamo, the hacker in whom she confided and who reported her to the FBI.) By disclosing military state secrets and telling the truth about the war, Manning violated the boundaries of publicity. By refusing to hide her sexual orientation and gender identity, she violated the army’s demands of privacy, as codified under “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” She was discredited on both fronts: bullied by fellow soldiers, court-martialed by the army, disbelieved by the public.
The question at the heart of Insurgent Truth is “how someone appears legible as a truth-teller in the first place” (p. xi). Maxwell’s answer involves, first, an analysis of the “hierarchies of credibility” that permeate society and structure politics and lead to the perception of some people as “unreliable observers of their own marginalization” or “untrustworthy witnesses to their own oppression” (p. xiii); second, she offers a defense of “outsider truth-telling,” understood as the set of practices by which members of marginalized and oppressed minorities depict their reality to each other and to the dominant public. Maxwell attentively engages with and contributes to Black, queer, feminist, and critical theory, as she situates Manning within a cohort of outsider truth-tellers that includes Virginia Woolf, Bayard Rustin, and Audre Lorde.
Insurgent Truth begins with a discussion of the relationship between democracy and truth in light of outsider truth-telling. The latter challenges the dominant view, often attributed to Hannah Arendt, that democracy depends on factual truth because it provides a prepolitical common ground. Maxwell highlights the antidemocratic aspect of this view, which supports one dominant system of representation and renders “marginalized speakers and unsettling truths about oppression and inequality always already insignificant to the public realm” (p. 9). The central chapters of the book show how outsider truth-tellers’ complex pictures of the world create fissures in this supposedly common ground by connecting marginalized individuals and creating spaces for them to imagine how to change the world (chap. 2) and by spurring collaborative, creative experimentation with alternative ways of living (chap. 3). It shows how outsider truth-tellers’ anonymity is a way to engage with, not remove themselves from, the public realm (chap. 4) and how their truth creates a “scene” that calls others to imagine new spaces and new ways of what it means to live collectively (chap. 5). Maxwell returns to the relation between democracy and truth in the sixth and final chapter, where she argues that outsider truth-tellers can generate “outsider security”—a new model of genuinely democratic stability—by inciting us to take pleasure and play a role in others’ depiction of reality. Maxwell’s wonderfully rich and compelling defense of outsider truth-telling will be of interest to social and political philosophers in general and to scholars of oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistance in particular.
I urge scholars of whistleblowing to pick up the book, too, although Maxwell is ostensibly not interested in intervening in that literature—yet could have fruitfully done so. Maxwell insists that portraying Manning as a whistleblower is a mistake: first because it separates Manning’s leaks from her gender nonconformity; second, because the whistleblower model encourages conceiving of the act of truth-telling as “constative and conservative, merely restoring the status quo, rather than performative and productive” (p. 80). Many whistleblowers’ truth is deployed in the service of rectifying and stabilizing a given organization, in accordance with its mission and the law. But Manning’s truth was an insurgent one because its implication was not that the government ought to conduct war better, in adherence with international law. Instead, she wanted to expose “the endless stream of death and violence and destruction” and unsettle patriarchal militarism (“Chelsea Manning Talks to Larissa MacFarquhar about Life after Prison,” New Yorker Podcast, 2017).
Nevertheless, Maxwell’s contrast between whistleblowers and outsider truth-tellers is arbitrary and ill-advised. Many whistleblowers are cast as outsiders from the moment they blow the whistle. They are discredited and retaliated against, portrayed as disloyal and treacherous. They often lose everything—family, friends, job and future professional prospects, money, and health. When Ron Ridenhour and Hugh Thompson exposed the My Lai massacre, they were attacked as traitors and received death threats. Most Americans did not believe them. While he collected evidence about My Lai, Ridenhour realized that far from being an isolated incident, the massacre was part of a master plan (Thomas Mueller, Crisis of Conscience, 2019). He became an outspoken antiwar and anti-imperialism activist.
The treatment of government whistleblowers who illegally stole and disclosed classified information is even worse, because they face the prospect of decades behind bars. (Maxwell never mentions the distinction between legal and illegal truth-telling nor considers that leaks of classified information might endanger national security and the safety of troops and be presumptively problematic.) Daniel Ellsberg, who has become the paragon of whistleblowing and was in many ways an impeccable insider, was vilified and prosecuted by the government for leaking the Pentagon Papers. His truth, like Ridenhour’s, was an insurgent one: he revealed not merely the US commission and covering up of war crimes but also their deliberate and systematic planning. Ellsberg has been a fervent antiwar activist and advocate for the freedom of the press ever since.
Similarly, and contra Maxwell’s reading, Edward Snowden revealed a deeply unsettling truth. As he makes clear in his memoir Permanent Record (2019), he wanted his leaks to expose the government’s capacity to conduct surveillance on an unimaginable scale, not simply the contingent fact that the programs were too intrusive and illegal. His truth generated fissures in the public understanding of publicity and privacy and invited a collective, democratic reimagining of the internet.
Maxwell neglects these insurgent truth-tellers because she starts from a fixed distinction between insiders (privileged) and outsiders (oppressed) and then shows how the latter are not seen as truth-tellers. However, these whistleblowers’ experiences suggest a different approach, better aligned with Maxwell’s own project of investigating the “institutional, legal, affective and discursive staging of political scenes” (p. xiii). One could take the insider/outsider distinction as malleable and examine the ways in which it is weaponized in support of ruling interests. Through a complex interplay of structures (e.g., army hierarchy), laws (such as the Espionage Act), cultural and political narratives (of loyalty and patriotism), and counter-offensive strategies (portraying the truth-teller as pathological or arrogant, their anonymity as cowardly, etc.), governments cast as outsiders those among them who dare speak the truth. Understanding how these tactics are deployed against any dissident would further the transformative, bridge-building project of outsider truth-telling.
