Posting on Daily Kos is new to me. But I started posting on Quora during 2016 — simply because I was horrified by the prospect of a Trump presidency. I was having anxiety attacks, for months prior to November. I went to have an EKG because I thought I might have a heart condition … I was upset by Bernie and Bernie people (including those on Morning Joe) spreading the false story that Hillary had “stolen” the nomination from Bernie, when she got 3.8 million more votes that Bernie did in the Democratic primaries. And more than anything else, I was upset by the waves of disinformation coming from Russians and Republicans, and the willingness of the US mainstream media to air the false allegations, and disinformation, and fluff piece non-news stories that Assange and Putin and Trump artfully served up to them, day after day. I wanted to try to cut through all of that noise, with some truth. I failed to prevent Trump from taking the White House, but I was dubbed a top poster on Quora, and they sent me a nice jacket …
I was really struck by the Russian cyber trolls. Some of them took American names but were easy to spot. Their Russian accents, even in written pieces, were quite thick, like the villains Boris and Natasha on Rocky and Bullwinkle saying: “We make big plan go kill Moose and Squirrel!” They would write pieces along the lines of: “My name John Smith. I am thinking Hillary no good, Bernie good but Hillary bad, I vote for Trump now, he is making America Great Again ...” Others were highly skilled, with superb English and a strong command of US social media slang — only giving themselves away now and then with British spellings like colour and some British idioms, as they pretended to be Americans. I knew that the ones on Quora were only a tiny fraction of Russian cyber trolls out there; there were legions more on Twitter and Facebook and other platforms, along with bots. This piece Samantha Bee did on her show, right before the 2016 election, made a big impression on me:
I was traumatized by what happened in the election, which realized all of my worst nightmares. I put out an album of anti-Trump songs — wrote them in the weeks that followed the election, as personal therapy. One was about what the Russians had done, written in the voice of a cyber troll:
The Russians disappeared from Quora for a while, for the most part — their work was done. But they came back for the 2018 elections, and now, of course, they are coming back again; I expect to see lots more of them as November approaches. What is most striking to me, though, is how utterly interchangeable the Russians and Republicans have become. It is reaching the point that when someone is bellowing disinformation at me on Quora, about Hillary and Uranium One, or Zelensky and Ukraine and the Bidens, or how “Mueller showed there was no collusion!” or whatever it is … it doesn’t matter anymore if the person writing it is actually an American or a Russian. They are all part of the same hive mind: the same democracy-hating, truth-destroying entity. Paid or unpaid, they are out to slime everything worth fighting for. They passionately believe in gun rights (for Americans only, obviously, not for Russians) and hate gays and Muslims and anyone who is not Christian and white, and they hate strong women, and they find Trump and Putin manly and commanding, and they sneer at notions of non-partisan government service and equal justice under the law … They are cynics, into crude and ugly humor, who see everything as a racket and who want to destroy the values I grew up assuming that almost everyone in the US believed in.
Today there was an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Evelyn N. Farkas. She was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia during Obama’s presidency. Her piece is called “Russia is interfering in our elections again. And Trump supporters are emulating Russian tactics.” She writes:
In 2017, I was attacked by the far right as well as Russian actors after speaking publicly as President Obama’s deputy assistant defense secretary for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia; today, the campaign against me appears to be domestic, albeit aided by Russian trolls. The political stakes are higher for all Americans this year, not just me. The tactics behind these attacks reveal a frightening development for American democracy.
In President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, disinformation and intimidation tactics are commonly used to silence domestic opposition. (So is murder.) False allegations, followed by contradictory, also false, narratives are the norm in Russian media and political discourse. Misinformation is so prevalent that many Russians are largely indifferent to what is actually true. In Trump’s America, similar tactics are taking hold. What began as a disconcerting nexus between Russia and the reactionary right in this and other countries has become part of the American right-wing repertoire.
Now she, is running for Congress in New York, and cyber trolls are bombarding people who work for her campaign “with a stream of vile, vulgar and sometimes violent messages, emotionally exhausting staff and volunteers.” And Tucker Carlson and other liars for the administration are attacking her on the air. It’s important that Americans understand how far the entire Republican Party has wandered from who they once were, and the values they purported to uphold, and the national security concerns they claimed to take seriously — just a few short years ago. Many of them may have been genuinely patriotic Americans while growing up: people who believed in free elections and national sovereignty, and who hated traitors and corruption and gangster states. But the entire GOP has, in effect, now become filled with Putin’s pod people. It’s very sad to see.