By David Harsanyi
Monday, February 24, 2020
The fearmongering over Russian election “interference”
might be the most destructive moral panic in American political life since the
Red Scare. Then again, to be fair, those who prosecuted the post-war hunt for
Communists had the decency to uncover a handful of infiltrators. We’ve yet to
meet a single American who’s been brainwashed or had their vote snatched away
by an SVR Twitterbot. Probably because no such person exists.
Nevertheless, millions of Americans believe that a
handful of terrible memes — and I mean the most amateurish
and puerile
efforts imaginable — on social media were enough to overturn a presidential
election in the most powerful nation on earth. Or, more likely, most pretend to
believe it. As Donald Trump’s fortunes have turned somewhat in recent weeks,
and socialist Bernie Sanders looks poised to take the Democratic Party
nomination, the Russians are once again coming to snatch your vote.
There were lots of “wows” from journalists on Twitter
last week when the New York Times reported that members of the House
Intelligence Committee were warned by an aide to Acting Director of National
Intelligence Joseph Maguire that Russia would be meddling in the 2020 campaign
in order to get President Trump reelected. When Trump found out, the Times
reported, he was furious that briefers had given Adam Schiff ammunition for
political attacks.
First off, this isn’t an absurd concern. In his effort to
undermine the public’s confidence in the elections for partisan purposes,
Schiff has shown an ugly and cynical propensity to exaggerate and lie about
Russian attempted meddling. He’s done more harm in undercutting American
trust in “democracy” than Putin.
He’s not the only one.
“Putin’s Puppet is at it again, taking Russian help for
himself,” Hillary Clinton, still struggling to come to terms with her
devastating loss, said Friday. “He knows he can’t win without it. And we can’t
let it happen.”
“We are now in a full-blown national security crisis,”
tweeted former CIA Director John Brennan, one of the leading culprits
perpetrating the Russia fraud. “By trying to prevent the flow of intelligence
to Congress, Trump is abetting a Russian covert operation to keep him in office
for Moscow’s interests, not America’s.”
As if often the case in Trump era, the initial thinly
sourced story and subsequent freakout was quickly tempered by additional reporting.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, for instance, reported that there was no intelligence
showing that Russians would interfere for Trump, only that they likely had a
“preference” for Trump because he was “a dealmaker.”
Here is Bloomberg’s Eli Lake:
In fact, Schiff — who was present
at the briefing in question — knows that there is no formal intelligence
finding that Russia is meddling on behalf of Trump. Administration and House
Republican sources tell me that the intelligence official who was briefing the
committee went “off script” when asked about Russia’s preference for Trump in
the presidential election. No other representatives from the intelligence
community at the briefing backed up her assertion, these sources say, nor did
the briefers provide specific intelligence, such as intercepted emails or
conversations, to support the claim.
The Washington Post also reported on Friday that
Sanders had been briefed by U.S. officials warning that Russia was trying to
help his presidential campaign. Democratic Party operatives took to the Sunday
shows to blame Russia for supporting Sanders — all in an effort to get Trump
reelected. Never mind that Bernie could easily have won the nomination in 2016.
Never mind that Sanders has built an impressive national movement over the
years. Never mind that the champions of the Democratic Party establishment are
astonishingly weak. Never mind the party’s base has been dramatically moving
Left for years. It’s gotta be Putin!
The Washington Post piece is thin on specifics,
which should lead us to believe the story is a politically motivated leak meant
to slow Sanders’s momentum. (Then again, Bernie was implying that the Russians
were responsible for the toxic campaign behavior of his Bro-sheviks, so maybe
he deserves it.)
There are few people who detest the candidacy and
philosophy of Sanders more than I, yet I’m positive that the KGB can’t give him
the Democratic Party nomination any more than they can install Donald Trump in the
White House. Only voters can.
It’s likely that Russia, as it did in 2016, will engage
in amateurish efforts to foment divisions among some American — as if we needed
any help. If they actually “hack” an election — a word incessantly, and
erroneously, used by journalists at the height of the Russia scare in 2017 —
we’ll know.
But the Russian hysteria plays into a long-standing
liberal conviction that feeble-minded conservatives vote against their own
interests only because they’ve been hoodwinked. It might be the doing of a
foreign power. It might be the plutocrats. It might be “special interests.” It
might even be domestic tricksters, like the ones in the much-discussed recent
McKay Coppins piece in The Atlantic, “The Billion-Dollar Disinformation
Campaign to Reelect the President” — a piece that offers over 8,000 chilling
words describing traditional political operations as something dark,
undemocratic, and new. Be prepared for a flood of similar pieces. Democrats
never lose elections. Elections are only stolen from them. Nothing but Trump
stepping down and admitting he’s a Putin asset will stop Democrats from
questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Of course, if you can’t handle some memes or misleading
ads, you probably shouldn’t be voting, anyway. You’re clearly not prepared for
the civic responsibilities that come with an open debate, which is often messy
and ugly, rather than hermetically sealed in a media-approved bubble.
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