All of America’s Enemies Are Seeking to Influence the Election

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 04, 2024

 

The Biden administration is preparing to accuse Russia of reprising the role it played in the 2016 and 2020 elections. On Wednesday, the Justice Department will allege that Kremlin-backed enterprises and agents plan to “target US voters with disinformation,” CNN reports.

 

And yet, some of the Russian efforts to manipulate voters and influence election outcomes in the U.S. are more overt than others. “RT, the Russian state media network, is a major focus of the U.S. announcement,” CNN’s dispatch says. “U.S. officials see the Russian outlet as a key piece of Kremlin propaganda efforts.”

 

Okay, sure. But if you were under the assumption that RT — formerly “Russia Today” — and its jazzy online sister site, Sputnik, were operating on the up-and-up, you’re either an extremely gullible news consumer or you are in the market for “Kremlin propaganda.”

 

A conscientious reader of journalism shouldn’t need to know that an outlet is funded by the Russian government to sniff out its anti-American bias. If you’re inclined to believe that the West provided material and financial support to Islamist Jihadists in Syria while Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its Russians sponsors waged noble war against Christianity’s enemies, you have suspended your capacity for disbelief. If you do not question the claim that the former Eastern Bloc states are desperate to return to Moscow’s warm embrace because the EU is more dictatorial than the Soviet Union, you’re either a fellow traveler or a useful idiot. If you convinced yourself that there was a real chance Texas would declare independence from the United States and inaugurate a bloody civil war over Joe Biden’s border crisis, you derived some psychological satisfaction from assuming the worst about America, its leaders, and your fellow countrymen.

 

Yes, RT and Sputnik are purveyors of propaganda — bad propaganda. The Biden DOJ is not going rogue here — Americans should be informed of foreign efforts to mislead them, and it’s not the only executive-branch agency doing that necessary work. But there is a question of emphasis here, especially insofar as Russia’s propaganda doesn’t seem much more sophisticated than the “Buff Bernie,” “Killery Rotten Clinton” and “click ‘like’ to help Jesus win” memes that some elected Democrats maintained (with all apparent seriousness) had a measurable impact on the outcome of the 2016 election.

 

It serves Democratic political objectives to focus prohibitively on Russia’s disinformation campaigns to the exclusion of other similar exercises. And there are many.

 

As Jim Geraghty expertly detailed this morning, the Chinese Communist Party’s influence on Western elections is growing more brazen by the day. It’s not just that the CCP infiltrated the governor of New York’s office and managed to ensure that she either propagated themes friendly to Beijing or omitted references to conditions inside China that its government doesn’t want you to know about. It’s that Chinese agents are alleged to have instigated protests in America’s streets, and China’s influence increasingly dominates the Chinese-language media market in the United States.

 

Beijing successfully intervened in a Democratic primary contest to ensure that Chinese dissident Xiong Yan did not win. The CCP is engaged in an influence campaign executed by the group “Spamouflage.” It’s “one of the world’s largest, covert online influence operations,” according to an intelligence officer with the data-analytics firm Graphika — aimed not at helping one candidate defeat another but at sowing disunion and undermining the public’s faith in America’s governing institutions.

 

“We have seen, generally speaking, evidence of attempts to influence and arguably interfere,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said of the Chinese. And Beijing’s targets are manifold. “Canada’s domestic spy agency concluded that China interfered in the last two elections,” Reuters reported of an April investigation into the elections that Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party won handily. Later that month, Australia’s home-affairs minister, Karen Andrews, claimed that the CCP had taken active measures to prop up the opposition party, which Beijing believes will be less resistant to “economic coercion.”

 

Maybe China doesn’t have a horse in the U.S. presidential race, but it sure seems to be putting its thumb on the scale for center-left parties elsewhere in the Anglosphere. Likewise, the Iranian assets seeking to intervene in U.S. politics know on which side their bread is buttered.

 

The FBI and other U.S. investigative agencies have concluded that the hacks targeting and releasing information gleaned from private Trump-campaign networks were part of Tehran’s broader campaign to “influence the U.S. election process.” Iran has been implicated in covert efforts to mobilize Americans against U.S. policies that support Israel and, therefore, are disadvantageous for the members of its terrorist proxy network waging war against the U.S. and the Jewish state.

 

But Iran’s designs are even more menacing than Russia’s or China’s. “Hackers linked to the IRGC appear to have a broad mandate to collect data the Iranian regime might find useful for kidnapping and assassination plots,” CNN reported last week. Its targets include Trump’s onetime national-security adviser, John Bolton, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and even Trump himself. Short of offing its American adversaries, however, Iran will have to satisfy itself with the promotion of false narratives designed to undermine Western support for Israel and its Gulf State adversaries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

 

The current information environment is hardly the Wild West, but the proliferation of freelancers and entrepreneurial media ventures has made it more difficult for the casual news consumer to sort out facts from falsehoods. The mainstream press should not escape blame for this condition. In abdicating its responsibility to vet candidates dispassionately, the Fourth Estate has created a market for alternative sources of information. There is no barrier to entry into that market that America’s enemies cannot overcome.

 

And yet, the most effective defense against bias is not to shield yourself from it but to broaden and vary your media diet. A wide range of sources helps a reader establish perspective, identify slanted or manipulative coverage, and assess an outlet or author’s intentions by seeing both what is being said and what is being conveniently omitted. Of course, nothing can save the news consumer who doesn’t want to be saved. There will always be a demand for anti-American propaganda among those who want to believe the very worst about their country and its citizens.

 

Even if you’re mistrustful of the mainstream press, however, your excessive credulity isn’t everyone else’s fault. If you’re inclined to nod along with the evidence-free assertion that the “deep state” is responsible for the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, that no American journalist save Tucker Carlson has ever tried to land an interview with Vladimir Putin, or that Marjorie Taylor Greene is a source of profound insight, I don’t know what to tell you. The internet isn’t for everyone.