I find the term “Fake News” off-putting, because so much of what we read nowadays isn’t exactly “fake” so much as it’s merely commentary pretending to be news. Do we really care if Donald Trump once slept with a Playboy Bunny, for instance? It may be true, or it may just be the Bunny chasing the carrots of a lucrative book deal and the fawning press coverage that comes along with any attempted debasement of the President. Its value as a genuine political development is nil; its only real value is as distraction.
A recent piece of political analysis in the Times over the current Russian distraction brought this to mind. The author takes it as a given that Mueller’s recent indictment of thirteen alleged Russian trolls is true — after all, we live in a new dispensation under which accusation supplants old-fashioned practices like evidence and trials — adding that, “it’s natural to think that Russia’s primary aim was to achieve the upset Trump victory we now know occurred. But if they were relying on the same polls as the rest of the world, they would have regarded that as a long-shot.”
So why do it? “The author hypothesizes that “Russia’s core goal was to sow doubt about the integrity and fairness of American elections — and, by implication, erode the credibility of any criticism aimed at Russia’s…” The real goal was to subvert our “attitudes toward democracy.”
Now I can see why Russia might want 20% of America’s uranium, and why it might want to know that senior Administration officials, even figures of influence like a former President, would be amenable to bribery. Hence the Uranium One matter seems to me to be a reasonable intelligence operation, well worth the $145 million sent to the Clinton Foundation.
What I can’t see is an agency that is the heir of the hard-nosed KGB spending millions, or even pennies, to change American “attitudes toward democracy.” Who over there cares what our “attitudes” toward democracy are? If a bunch of us suddenly started favoring monarchy, or parliamentarianism, how would that gratify the Kremlin? If we started favoring fascism instead, would they like that better? The last time Russia mixed it up with a fascist state, times were not exactly jolly; the USSR got along a lot better with the Weimar Republic than with the Nazi state. The Russians don’t appear to favor democracy much personally, but I should think they would want to strengthen it elsewhere all they can. Democracies tend to leave Russia alone. The Hitlers invade, but the Churchills don’t.
For this reason (and a few others) I find the notion of Russian interference weird. They spy on us, of course–who doesn’t? But mostly, I imagine, to pirate tech, to find out what crazy things we’re likely to do in places like Syria and Iran that are close to their nation, and because that’s what intelligence agencies do. Intelligence, like all other modern bureaucratic activity, strives to be cost-effective; you have to get something for it to justify the cost.
Why put in millions (not to mention risking serious blowback) purely to get a larger number of Americans thinking democracy is shittier than we already think it is? After all, the Times, the Post, CNN are already doing all they can to suggest that the Electoral college is rubbish, the voters are Deplorables, party polarization is toxic and worsening, Congress and the White House are in eternal gridlock, that the system is so out of whack that it puts a demented racist at the helm. Why should Russia spend money poisoning our views of democracy when the media do it so much better for free?
Moreover, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein stated flatly in his press conference, “There is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.” Well, that seems to put the Russian collusion story to bed, and it suggests that the activity cited was completely useless. So why would Russia even bother?
It may be objected that while I think dissing democracy in general and Hillary in particular on social media makes no sense, Mueller has indicted thirteen Russian nationals, so Game Over! Russian interfered! To no effect, maybe, but so what?
Well, the problem that I have with that is that, as I understand American traditions and law, we are supposed to extend the blessings of democracy to all immigrants and visitors to our fair shores, and one of these is the First Amendment, protecting people’s right to free speech. So if a bunch of Russians, funded or otherwise, Kremlin-connected or not, posted messages on Twitter and chatted up Jill and Bernie and Donald but not Hillary on public forums, what are we supposed to do about it? Isn’t it a violation of our democracy to not allow them to express their views? They don’t have to come to America at all, for that matter. Why can’t they do the same thing from the comfort of their dachas?
If the (alleged) trolls were extradited to the US, once here, why could they not claim it an infringement on their freedom of speech to be punished for merely saying things? Why is it a high crime for a Russian to say “Hillary, ugh!” when tens of millions of Americans, and people all over the world, were saying the same thing and having it show up on American browsers?
The fact is, there’s really nothing you can do to keep people from posting things on social media, or from doing so under made-up names. In theory we can make it a crime to criticize any Democratic candidate whatever, but practice is another story. Those who think you can censor the entire internet simply don’t understand how it works.
But here’s what really puzzles me about all this. It was known beforehand. The FBI indictment is little more than a plagiarized version of a 2013 Atlantic article, a 2014 BuzzFeed report, and Ukranian article published in 2015 that mentions all thirteen of the Russian individuals named in the Mueller indictment:
ATLANTIC: Russians Online Comment Army (2013)
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/russias-online-comment-propaganda-army/280432/
BUZZFEED: Documents Show How Russia’s Troll Army Hit America (2014)
https://archive.fo/2ZomP
UKRANIAN ARTICLE (2015):
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.radiosvoboda.org%2Fa%2F26903778.html
So basically, these activities were being reported on — names named and everything — for as long as almost five years prior to the election. All of it during the Obama administration. And no one in the FBI or the intelligence agencies said or did anything. Why did it take Trump to come onto scene, and one and a half years and nearly ten million dollars of “investigating” to click over to an readily available BuzzFeed article? Why did it take Bob Mueller and his staff of elite attorneys over thirteen months to read and copy-paste an article from 2013 that I pulled up in two minutes over my bacon and eggs after reading about his indictment?
Oh, and while we’re on the subject, let’s also review Russian busts of CIA spies running fake companies that don’t exist anywhere in Russian financial records:
https://thesaker.is/a-brief-history-of-the-kremlin-trolls/
Apparently, “The United Business Registry database in Russia works according to the Federal laws, so after twelve months of inactivity a business is simply liquidated. The Internet Research Agency was liquidated in December 2016 by the government system after it been inactive. Its inactivity implied that the company had no employees, no office, and no bank transactions for at least twelve months.”
No employees, no office, no bank transactions–no evidence? Don’t be silly. Russian interference must be found, even if its effect is non-existent, and Russians and Russian entities must be indicted, even if they don’t appear to be in-country any more, or even exist. Is this news, really, or is it simply Pirandello: six anti-Trump narratives in search of a conspiracy?
Stupidity and incompetence, raised to a high intensity, sometimes give the appearance of mystery and complexity: surely, we think, there’s a reason that these things don’t quite add up. Maybe sometimes there is. But increasingly the Mueller indictments appear to be only a face-saving attempt to point a finger at Russia so as to distract attention from an Obama administration whose bumbling and corruption is getting ever harder to hide.
Let no one imagine I say that to defend Donald Trump. I do think it is really unlikely that the Russian government would do something as risky, costly, and near-impossible to do as rig an American Presidential election. If Hillary, with her billion-and-a-half dollar campaign expenditures and with the whole of the establishment media (and apparently help from FBI and intelligence agency notables) couldn’t do it, thirteen Twitter trolls sure aren’t going to pull it off. But the attempt isn’t flatly impossible. Just silly.
The thing is, there are larger issues. What we are failing to understand is the uncontrollability, unreliability and radical transparency imposed by the internet and digitized communications generally, and the ambiguity and untrustworthiness of intelligence in a politically polarized environment. We need to think more deeply about those things, and we would, if we could lift our eyes from Donald Trump to the evolving media seas in which the hated White Whale swims. Unfortunately, throwing a harpoon into the White Whale is all that Trump Derangement Syndrome allows us.