By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, April
06, 2021
Why do the Russians need to bother
spreading disinformation when our own domestic sources do a much better job at
it?
We just went through a four-year national
obsession with Kremlin disinformation. It supposedly swayed the 2016
presidential election. It was “sowing divisions” in American society. It
accounted for the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election.
Social-media companies were excoriated for
allegedly letting Russian disinfo poison their networks, and the American mind.
There was nothing that some Russian
operators — spending a pittance — couldn’t do. The former Time magazine
managing editor and Obama State Department official Richard Stengel wrote a
book called Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against
Disinformation and What We Can Do About It. According to Stengel, the
Russians had mounted “an unprecedented attack against the very foundation of our
democracy.”
The Russians were amateurs, though. If
they really knew what they were doing, they’d spread rank lies about election
reforms passed by an American state, make the deceptions so pervasive that the
president of the United States would casually repeat them, unjustifiably dredge
up memories of a terrible period of repression in America, relentlessly
racialize the debate, and intimidate corporate America into thoughtlessly
entering the partisan fight and discrediting itself with a significant segment
of the population.
No, Russian trolls operating somewhere in
St. Petersburg didn’t undertake this highly successful information operation
against the Georgia election law — Stacey Abrams and her allies in media and
politics did.
If the Russians had the requisite
skill, they’d spread the false story that a talented American
governor had sold out his citizens by letting a campaign contribution distort
his distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, suppressing all facts to the contrary
and stoking yet more conspiratorial thinking about the governor among his
political opponents.
The Russians couldn’t pull this off —
yet 60 Minutes did, in a laughably dishonest report over the
weekend about Florida governor Ron DeSantis using the most popular grocery
store chain in the state to get the vaccine in the arms of Floridians.
If the Russians were devious enough,
they’d take a god-awful mass shooting, ignore all of the evidence about the
perpetrator’s motives to define it as a crime driven by racial hatred, and
undermine faith in the local police and FBI when they presented the facts.
The Russians couldn’t manage this, either
— but a veritable army of media commentators and progressive politicians could.
They insisted against the available evidence that the Atlanta spa shooter must
have been driven by hatred of Asians, while Democratic senators openly
dissented from the FBI director’s statement that the shooting wasn’t a hate
crime.
If the Russians had the power or know-how,
they’d spin a story of American law enforcement as a racist occupying force
that should be resisted in “largely peaceful” protests all over the country,
putting the cops on their back foot and creating an environment of spiraling
disorder and violence in some of the most iconic U.S. cities.
Of course, the Russians also had nothing
to do with this — Black Lives Matter and the media did all of the hard work and
have largely managed to ignore the rising tide of crime that is undoing one of
the signal American domestic accomplishments of the past several decades.
None of this is to dismiss the pernicious
influence of Russian information operations and cyber strikes, especially
overseas, or to minimize the hideousness of the Putin regime. But it is galling
to see the same people who sounded the klaxons about Russians undermining faith
in the American system for years themselves spread — or at least casually
accept — progressive narratives based on poisonous lies about our own country.
The Russians are never going to stop
running their information campaigns against the West, which date back to the
Soviet Union. But they must occasionally be tempted to stand back in envy and
awe at all that the U.S. promoters of woke narratives have been able to
accomplish without them.
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