In December 2020, I posted my MA dissertation proposal on this site. It was titled “Defending the Feed,” and I was proud of it.

I wrote almost none of it.

The dissertation I actually submitted to the Department of War Studies at King’s College London three years later asked a different question, used a different method, and sat in a different intellectual tradition.

You can read both documents today: the proposal is still on this site, and the dissertation is on SSRN.

This essay is about the distance between them, because that distance is where I actually learned what research is.

What I proposed

“Defending the Feed” was a practitioner’s document. It asked how nation-states and non-state actors run disinformation campaigns through social media, took the 2016 election interference as its case, and argued three things: that traditional deterrence doesn’t work against these operations, that counterintelligence agencies aren’t prepared to detect them, and that we need new strategies built on intelligence sharing between the public and private sectors.

If that sounds like a white paper, that’s because it was one. I had spent decades in crisis management and intelligence work, and I proposed what people like me write: an assessment of a threat, ending in recommendations.

The tell is in the verbs. Every claim in that proposal points toward what we should do. Not one of them asks what is actually happening and why.

I didn’t see that at the time. I saw a topic I cared about and a stack of things I wanted to say about it.

Too broad

Here’s what “too broad” actually means, from inside. Deterrence theory is a dissertation. Counterintelligence readiness is a dissertation. Platform governance is a dissertation. The 2016 interference operations alone have produced a shelf of books. I had proposed all of it at once, in a masters dissertation, and the reading for any one of those claims would have consumed the entire project before I wrote a word about the others.

Breadth feels like ambition when you propose it. It’s actually the absence of a question.

Enter Pablo

My supervisor was Dr Pablo de Orellana, a scholar of diplomacy, nationalism, and identity whose work examines how language constructs the political world, how policy comes to decide who peoples are.

Which is to say: I proposed a counterintelligence white paper to a discourse theorist.

He never told me the topic was too broad. He led me to discover it.

He assigned me a paper on adjacent themes and told me to read it. Then he told me to read that paper’s sources. That took about a month, and it did two things at once. It taught me the actual state of research in the space I thought I knew, and it showed me the boundary of it, the edge where the literature stops.

When I came back, he said, in effect: I see the green space. The green space is this.

Original research isn’t a topic you care about. It’s a gap you can locate.

You find it by triangulation: map what exists thoroughly enough that what doesn’t exist becomes visible. The questions that mattered stopped being mine and became the field’s: why were some of these influence efforts successful while others weren’t? Why this language, in these mouths? What did it actually mean, and to whom?

Those are not policy questions.

They’re questions about how meaning gets made. I had arrived, without quite noticing the door, in discourse analysis.

January 6

One month after I posted that proposal, a mob overran the United States Capitol.

I won’t overstate this. The pivot was already underway in supervision. But January 6 settled something for me: the live question wasn’t foreign intelligence services injecting content into American feeds.

It was rhetoric, specific discursive strategies, working on a domestic audience, in the open, with consequences you could watch on television.

The interesting problem wasn’t defending the feed from outsiders. It was understanding how a movement inside the country had built its own account of what was true, and why that account held.

The Foucault mountain

Discourse analysis came from Pablo. Understanding it came at a price.

To use the method honestly, I had to read Foucault. Nearly all of Foucault, as it turned out, which I do not recommend attempting in the gaps of running a company.

It’s a lot of text and more to process: power and knowledge as one system, truth as something produced by institutions and procedures rather than merely discovered, the concept that eventually organized everything I now do academically: the regime of truth.

There’s a comedy in this I can see from a distance. A nearly fifty-year-old crisis management consultant, whose professional life runs on checklists and decision authority, spending his nights working through a French philosopher’s account of how societies decide what counts as true.

But the framework fit the phenomenon better than anything in my old toolkit because it wasn’t a security breach. It was meaning-making.

What I wrote

The dissertation I submitted was “A Discourse Analysis of Donald Trump’s and the American Alt-Right’s Conception of Truth and its Implications for Public Discourse.”

Not how to stop foreign disinformation. Instead, how a domestic political movement constructed its own conception of truth, bypassed the traditional gatekeepers, and fragmented the public discourse that those gatekeepers had anchored.

A narrow question, honestly answerable inside one project, sitting in a real gap in the literature. Everything the proposal wasn’t.

Where it led

Here’s the part I couldn’t have predicted in 2020. The pivot wasn’t a detour on the way to a degree. It became the research program.

The dissertation’s core idea, that movements build rival systems for deciding what’s true, is the spine of everything I’ve written since: my study of alt-right identity construction in Royce White’s digital discourse, my new paper on the George Floyd revisionist narrative, and the doctoral work I’m doing now at Hamline.

None of that exists if I’d written “Defending the Feed.”

Two lessons, for anyone heading into a research degree mid-career.

First: your expertise is the raw material, and it’s also the trap. Practitioners propose answers. Scholars locate questions. The discipline of the second is learnable, but someone usually has to teach it to you, and the teaching looks like a month of assigned reading rather than a lecture.

Second: leave your old proposals up. Mine has been sitting on this site since 2020, confidently describing a dissertation that doesn’t exist. I could have quietly deleted it. But the gap between that post and the finished work is the most honest record I have of what graduate education actually did to my thinking.

That gap is the education.