Paranoia On The Left.

How Do We Silence Them? The ruling obsession of the contemporary Left is that political action undertaken by individuals or groups further to the right than the liberal wings of mainstream conservative parties should not only be condemned, but suppressed.

WEB OF CHAOS, a “deep dive into the world of disinformation”, originally screened on Television New Zealand in November 2022. It was screened again last Sunday. (19/5/24) At the time of its first showing, the New Zealand Left was still reeling from the impact of the occupation of Parliament Grounds and its violent dissolution. Acutely aware that the electoral love of 2020 was fast evaporating, “progressives” were grappling with the first intimations of paranoid dread.

That paranoid dread has been thrown into overdrive by the reactionary policies of the victorious political parties of the 2023 general election. In the seven months that have elapsed since its electoral defeat, the Left’s intense fear of the unenlightened masses has grown to match the Right’s deep mistrust, bordering on hatred, of the highly-educated. TVNZ’s decision to re-screen Web of Chaos (WOC) confirms that the “woke” power structure’s core political fixation – the growing influence and power of digitally delivered “disinformation” – remains as strong as ever.

Slickly directed by Justin Pemberton, one of New Zealand’s leading documentary-makers, WOC nevertheless fails the test of the classic documentary feature by rigorously excluding from the discussion/debate all but the most active promoters of the proposition that digitally delivered disinformation constitutes an existential threat to human civilisation. No one whose testimony might tend to attenuate this core argument makes Pemberton’s final cut. Kindred Films and the Docufactory, the makers of WOC, were willing drivers down a one-way street.

The ideas and accusations of these digital disinformation doom-sayers are illustrated throughout the feature by a powerful and continuous series of disturbing images, augmented by a suitably menacing soundtrack. So much so that, in spite of being professionally produced, the documentary ends up having more than a little in common, visually and auditorily, with the fetid Far-Right propaganda videos it purports to deplore.

Had the project been commissioned in 2023, it is interesting to speculate whether dramatic developments in the disinformation debate would have persuaded Pemberton and his co-producer, Megan Jones, to deliver a very different documentary to TVNZ.

Since WOC’s completion in 2022, the revelations generally referred to as “The Twitter Files” (so-called because they were released to senior US journalists, including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, by Elon Musk, following his takeover of the social-media company) have presented evidence that the extensive campaign against disinformation, born of the social-media chicanery that enabled both Brexit and Trump, and intensified by the social-media amplified pushback against the state’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, was initiated within the national security apparatus of the United States, and rapidly reproduced in the analogous state machinery of countries over which the US exercises decisive influence.

Certainly, this is the provenance of New Zealand’s own “Disinformation Project” (whose Director, Kate Hannah, was one of the principal contributors to WOC) which began in the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet, was then given “cover” by the University of Auckland, and is now an “independent” entity funded by a person, or persons, or state institutions, unknown.

One can only hope that the Twitter Files would have prompted WOC’s producers’ to give considerably more attention, journalistically, to the role of the state in disseminating and suppressing disinformation. Or, at the very least, to have elicited a concession that it isn’t just the governments of Russia and China that tell lies and suppress free speech.

The events of 2023 might also have persuaded Pemberton and Jones that the spreading of disinformation and conspiratorial thinking is not restricted to Far Right incels (involuntary celibates) hunched over slimy keyboards in dank parental basements. The Left is every bit as capable as the Right of creating and disseminating conspiracy theories of its own. Capable, too, of believing its own disinformation.

The “Atlas Conspiracy”, for example, has taken so firm a hold of the New Zealand Left’s imagination that it is now being paraded as fact on “progressive” websites.

It all began when left-wing activists in Australia discovered that the Atlas Network – a sort of international clearing-house for, and advisor to, 450 right-wing libertarian think tanks – may, at some point in the past, have influenced a number of the individuals and groups arguing for a “No” vote in Australia’s “Voice” referendum. In response to the Australian people’s decisive rejection of the proposal to sanction a constitutionally-recognised voice for indigenous Australians, disillusioned and angry Aussie “progressives” concocted an alarming tale of shadowy right-wing forces, orchestrated by the Atlas Network, conspiring to give the nay-sayers their dark victory.

To both forewarn and forearm opponents of Act leader David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, Māori nationalists in this country were quick to spread the Atlas conspiracy theory, breathlessly pointing out that Seymour’s legislation also [cue scary music] involves holding a binding referendum.

That David Seymour, long before he became an Act MP, had worked for right-wing Canadian think-tanks linked (as just about all right-wing think-tanks are these days) to the Atlas Network, was offered up as the conspiracists’ “smoking gun”. That the information had been on the public record for years, and was not in the least surprising, given Seymour’s ideological leanings, counted for nought. Guilt by association, long the favoured workhorse of the Far Right, was shamelessly harnessed to the Left’s conspiratorial cart.

Would Pemberton and Jones have included the Atlas Conspiracy in their “deep dive into the world of disinformation” if they had been making their documentary in 2023-24? Certainly, an editorial decision to exclude such clear evidence of conspiratorial thinking not being an exclusively right-wing phenomenon would have been deeply regrettable.

Regrettable, but also inevitable, since the ruling obsession of the contemporary New Zealand Left, and indeed of left-wingers across the Western World, is that political action undertaken by individuals or groups further to the right than the liberal wings of mainstream conservative parties should not only be condemned, but suppressed.

That a group like the Atlas Network should be permitted to solicit the support of right-wing donors in its mission to spread the libertarian-capitalist gospel around the world (a perfectly legal activity BTW) is, from the perspective of the contemporary Left, intolerable. That the Koch Brothers, whose generosity to hundreds, if not thousands, of right-wing organisations is legendary, might be tangentially associated with the Act Party, through its leader, and his Canadian employers of decades ago, is all the Left’s propagandists’ need to portray the Atlas Network as a deadly spider sucking the life out of New Zealand’s democracy.

As a documentary, Web of Chaos would, arguably, be much improved by the inclusion of more voices than those belonging to the usual disinformation suspects – all of whom dutifully regurgitate to its viewers the arguments developed by American bureaucrats anxious to deny social-media platforms to those who dare to take issue with their political masters’ policies. Only very briefly does the documentary make reference to disinformation’s Cold War origins. A great pity, since the proclivity of states to narrow the sluicegates of political information is as old as history.

The Left was once well aware of where most of the truly dangerous political lies come from. That “progressives” no longer fear, nor condemn, the state’s disinformation, to the point where they are now creating their own, is as troubling as it is depressing.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project (Substack) on Monday, 20 May 2024.

Disinformation From The Left.

Dangerously Persuasive: When Hamas unleashes terror in Southern Israel, and the State of Israel unleashes hell in retaliation, disinformation is important. Which is why, by way of example, the Instagram message released a day ago by Pere Huriwai-Seger on behalf of the Aotearoa Liberation League is important.

DISINFORMATION has been part and parcel of the political process since, well, forever. It was only in the Nineteenth Century, however, that the need to create narratives advantageous to one’s own cause, and disadvantageous to one’s opponents, gained access to technologies enabling disinformation to be communicated at great speed and on a massive scale. With the dawning of the Twentieth Century, even more startling technological innovations upped the effectiveness of disinformation by several orders of magnitude. The old adage: “A lie will be half way around the world before Truth has pulled his boots on”; became a straightforward description of reality. By the Twenty-First Century, technology had advanced to the point where the separation of truth from falsehood required the adjudication of experts – and the ability to distinguish fake expertise from the real thing.

When people talk about disinformation today, it is almost always from within a left-wing narrative framework. The villains behind the disinformation tsunami allegedly inundating the civilised world are identified as white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes, anti-vaccination zealots, and fundamentalist Christians.

In normal circumstances, the pet-hates of leftists don’t carry very much weight. Unfortunately, the life of the world stopped being normal in January 2020, as it became clear that a novel coronavirus – Covid-19 – was about to ignite a global pandemic. Fearful that the small but very vocal clusters of anti-vaccination zealots, located in just about all Western nations, would undermine the public health and immunological measures vital to fighting the virus, public servants began establishing anti-disinformation units to identify and counter the lies being spread about Covid-19, and, more importantly, the vaccines developed in record time to bring it under control.

In those countries with centre-left national and/or state governments, most particularly the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, politicians and activists moved swiftly to extend the brief of these disinformation units to encompass just about all of the Left’s pet-hates. The situation was not improved by the intervention of national security agencies alarmed at the volume of Russian and Chinese disinformation pouring onto Western social media platforms.

From the perspective of the Left, this conflation of Far-Right disinformation with the disinformation emanating from authoritarian nation states would prove to be enormously helpful. A pro-censorship position, which at least some of the mainstream media might have challenged, could now be presented as a matter of national security. In New Zealand, willingness to buy into this aspect of the anti-disinformation project was aided by the still raw memories of the Christchurch Mosque Massacres. Far-Right lies could produce deadly consequences, argued the Left. Free speech should not be considered an unqualified good, not when it empowers “bad actors”.

What the New Zealand Left – notoriously ignorant of its own, and the international movement’s history – finds it almost impossible to accept is that disinformation (or, as it was once, more honestly, known: “propaganda”) was, and is, every bit as rampant on the revolutionary left, as it was, and is, on the reactionary right. Indeed, modern disinformation/propaganda was more-or-less invented by Willi Münzenberg, a German political impresario, commissioned by the Communist International to spread the Bolshevik’s revolutionary creed across the West. Tactics we take for granted today: front organisations, activist celebrities, newspapers, magazines, plays, movies, and phonograph records – all with an easily digestible political sub-text, were Münzenberg’s inventions. In the early 1920s, the Right had nothing to match “Willi’s Wurlitzer”.

Not that the state-subsidised Disinformation Project would ever acknowledge the fact, but the effectiveness of New Zealand’s right-wing disinformers is well below that of their left-wing rivals. Better educated, more articulate, technically more proficient, and – most importantly – working with, not against, the grain of New Zealand’s official “progressive” ideology, New Zealand’s left-wing activists’ political and cultural production throws that of the Right into the shade. Their output can be found on Facebook, Instagram, X and Tik-Tok – global platforms often denied to the Right by Silicon Valley’s “progressive” billionaires. Freed from the need to hawk their ideological wares in the murky swamps of Telegram, the Left’s disinformers/propagandists have no need for false identities. Operating freely, under their own names, they have ready access to the hearts and minds of millions.

Not that very many New Zealanders know or care what the Left is saying. Indeed, political speech only becomes important in moments of national and international crisis. In the middle of a global pandemic, disinformation is important. When Russia invades Ukraine, disinformation is important. When Hamas unleashes terror in Southern Israel, and the State of Israel unleashes hell in retaliation, disinformation is important. Which is why, by way of example, the Instagram message released a day ago (22/10/23) by Pere Huriwai-Seger on behalf of the Aotearoa Liberation League (a front organisation comprised of Pere and his wife Sarah) is important.

With film-star good looks and a compelling verbal style, Pere commands the viewers attention from the moment he authoritatively disabuses them of any notion that what is currently unfolding in Gaza is not their fight. New Zealand, he informs them “has troops involved”. An alarming “fact” if one’s knowledge of New Zealand’s role in the Middle East is poor – i.e. most of the New Zealand population. That Pere flashes up a media release explaining that New Zealand has eight military personnel serving in the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation in no way excuses his claim that the country has troops involved. In the minds of his viewers his words will have conjured up images of Kiwi soldiers rubbing shoulders with members of the Israeli Defence Force. It’s misinformation shading into disinformation.

Pere’s pace is brisk, and just seconds later he is informing his viewers that New Zealand has “long supported the colonisation of Palestine”. This is historical nonsense – and malicious nonsense at that. He states as a fact that New Zealand “invaded” Palestine and “seized it for Britain” in 1917. Curiously, he neglects to inform his viewers that the New Zealand Mounted Rifles was merely one unit in the British Expeditionary Force waging war against the Ottoman Empire, of which Palestine was a mere province. According to Pere, the province was handed over to “Zionist terrorists”. Curiouser and curiouser, since Ottoman Palestine was actually handed over to the British by the League of Nations as a “mandated territory”, and remained in British hands until 1948.

But Pere is just getting warmed-up. While they were busy making Palestine safe for Zionism, argues Pere, the Kiwis treated the Palestinian people “horribly”. He cites the Surafend massacre of 1918 as proof.

What happened at Surafend wasn’t pretty, but it didn’t happen out of the blue. Troopers of the NZ Mounted Rifles and the Australian Light Horse went to the village of Surafend to secure the surrender of the Palestinian Arab who had shot dead a New Zealander, Trooper Leslie Lowry, after stealing his kit-bag. Their demand refused, the Anzacs attacked the men of the village (having evacuated the women and children to a place of safety) killing between 40 and 200 Arabs, and setting their houses on fire. The Anzac perpetrators received a tongue-lashing from the British commander, Allenby, but none of them were ever punished.

Had Pere homed-in on the Surafend massacre right from the start of his video, he could have presented a picture of New Zealand’s complicity in British, and later American, imperialism that was not only persuasive by truthful. Instead, by surrounding the Surafend massacre with a string of disinformative statements, the whole four-minute video becomes an exercise in the most blatant propaganda. And not just any propaganda, Pere’s falsehoods are the falsehoods of Hamas and their Iranian backers – whose cause Pere equates with the cause of Māori nationalism in Aotearoa. Presumably, what Hamas terrorists did to the Jewish inhabitants of Southern Israel is what decolonisation looks like.

Imagine the reaction of the Disinformation Project if they had found a video presentation promoting right-wing disinformation and hate on such a scale. A video dripping with Islamophobic hate in the same way Pere’s drips with annihilationist hatred of Israel. Such a video would have been presented to the mainstream media as evidence of the danger posed by radical political extremism; of the need to take decisive action against such horrific hate speech.

And the mainstream media would have lapped it up.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Monday, 23 October 2023.

Too Many Angels And Devils.

 

He’s got the fire and the fury

At his command

Well, you don’t have to worry

If you hold on to Jesus’ hand

We’ll all be safe from Satan

When the thunder rolls

We just gotta keep the devil

Way down in the hole

─ Tom Waits, “Way Down In The Hole”

WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE about Stuff Circuit’s Fire and Fury? It’s a well-made documentary of the sort New Zealand television used to make, but now only produces intermittently. It seeks answers to the questions many New Zealanders have been asking themselves since Parliament Grounds went up in flames on 2 March 2022. The driving force behind Fire and Fury, the highly-experienced journalist, Paula Penfold, has delivered on her promise to go behind the events of that day and name the names of those who were, at least in part, responsible for the disturbing scenes that marked the end of the weeks-long anti-vaccination protest.

Why, then, has the documentary left me feeling vaguely uneasy? And, before you object – “It’s meant to! – my uneasiness has nothing to do with the unsavoury cast of proto-fascist conspiracy theorists and “influencers” whose faces and words feature so prominently throughout the documentary. Sure, these people are loathsome, and their comments teeter alarmingly on the brink of outright criminality, but that is entirely unsurprising. From the get-go, the tone, sound-track, and crepuscular palette of the production cues the viewer for the darkness of its subject-matter.

Borrowing their title from Tom Waits’ Way Down In The Hole suggests that the makers of Fire and Fury see their subjects as being down there with the Devil. Perhaps that’s it? Perhaps it was my unconscious conflation of “Jesus’ hand” with the hands of the documentary’s producers, that gave me the uneasy feeling that I was being led to someone else’s holier-than-thou explanation for the rolling political thunder of our times.

Bluntly, Fire and Fury relies much too heavily on the “expert” commentary of Kate Hannah, a principal investigator and director of The Disinformation Project, a state-funded research exercise run out of Te Pūnaha Matatini at the University of Auckland. In an interview with Dale Husband on the Māori radio station, Waatea, Hannah revealed that The Disinformation Project had been set up in February 2020, immediately prior to the outbreak of the Covid-19 Pandemic, to counter the anti-government, anti-scientific, and anti-medicine narratives that the authorities were clearly anticipating.

What is it that disturbs me about The Disinformation Project? Surely, having people monitor the misinformation and disinformation being spread deliberately during a major medical emergency is an entirely sensible government initiative? Any undermining of the collective effort to protect the population from the effects of a potentially deadly virus is prima facie evidence of evil intent. Many would say that identifying and neutralising such anti-social elements is an important state responsibility.

True enough, but why bury such a unit deep in the dense undergrowth of academia? And why appoint as its director a woman whose Masters thesis was on Nineteenth Century American literary culture, rather than a qualified medical administrator? If such a unit was needed, then why not set it up within the Ministry of Health, and make it answerable to the then Director-General of Health, Ashley Bloomfield?

The problem is, the moment you start asking questions like this you immediately run the risk of being branded a conspiracy theorist. And that just circles the whole argument back to its starting-point: the dark narrative of evil intent which lies at the heart of Fire and Fury.

The question, never satisfactorily answered, which lies at the heart of the heart of Fire and Fury is – Why? What is it that prompts individuals to create false political, economic and cultural narratives in the first place? More importantly, what is it that makes otherwise perfectly sensible and caring people follow these fantasists down their rabbit holes?

Well, what led Alice down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carrol’s famous children’s story? Wasn’t it the sight of a waist-coated white rabbit consulting a pocket-watch and muttering “I’m late!”? Who wouldn’t want to get to the bottom of a sight as peculiar as that!

Many people find themselves caught up in events over which they exercise no control, and which they do not understand. Since, in small matters, they find it easy to identify cause and effect, they assume (wrongly) that big events can be equally easily explained.

This is by no means an unreasonable assumption, given the propensity of governments to explain large events in the most simplistic terms. Those who remain unconvinced by these official versions, all too often discover their scepticism is entirely justified. Nothing encourages the growth of conspiracy theories faster that citizens discovering that their own governments have conspired to deceive them.

In Fire and Fury, Kate Hannah explains the concept of what she calls “necessary” or “protective” violence. Once a group of citizens convinces themselves that their government, motivated by pure evil, is “coming after their kids”, then there is nothing they will not contemplate to keep their loved ones, and their homeland, safe.

Step this argument back a few paces, and it is possible to grasp how individuals of an authoritarian and/or paranoid temperament, having learned that their government has deliberately lied to them, decide that striking back with lies of their own is not only justified – but also the only effective way to balance the scales.

Like the evil wizard in the tale of Aladdin, the conspiracy theorists come offering “new lamps [lies] for old”. And, like all good liars, they mix in a hefty portion of the truth in with their falsehoods. “Why is it,” they ask, “that you will never encounter people with information contradicting the government’s claims in the mainstream news media?” While most people will respond by pointing out the idiocy of spreading false information during a pandemic, a not inconsiderable minority will accept the conspiracy theorists’ explanation that the news media are nothing more than the paid mouthpieces of a government unwilling to tell its citizens the truth.

It is a great pity that Paula Penfold and her team did not spend more time talking to the fiery and furious individuals around whose behaviour the documentary was constructed. A pity, too, that they did not explore in greater depth the popular conviction that the Public Interest Journalism Fund – which paid for Fire and Fury – is proof of the conspiracy theorists’ contention that the mainstream news media has, indeed, been bought and paid for.

Yes, there is an argument to be made that it is better to allow these “influencers” to condemn themselves out of their own mouths, than it is to interview them one-on-one. Equally, there is an argument for doing both: broadcasting their views – and also asking them to explain why they continually engage in such dangerous speech. Watching Fire and Fury, it is easy to apprehend its makers’ fear of “the mob”. The hostility directed towards journalists who were “just doing their job” by militant anti-vaxxers certainly was frighteningly intense.

And yet, these people are New Zealanders, too. And perhaps that is what, in the end, made me feel so uneasy about the Fire and Fury documentary. Watching it, the viewer cannot help being struck by the vast epistemological gulf separating its subjects from its makers.

Listening to Hannah and the other, equally disdainful “experts” consulted by Penfold and her team, the viewers could be forgiven for thinking that they was listening to a team of anthropologists describing the cultural practices of a particularly belligerent tribe of indigenes. Certainly, the inclusion of Rebecca Kitteridge, Director of the SIS, among that commentary team does not bode well for the future safety of this truculent tribe.

Fire and Fury didn’t quite call them “deplorables” – but it came close.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 15 August 2022.

The Disinformation Game

"Who's youse accusin' of innference?" Without the timely intervention of a team of top American political consultants and campaign experts, Boris Yeltsin would never have won his second term as President of the Russian Federation. The Russians waited 20 years to return the favour.

WHEN IT COMES to the disinformation game, the Russians have got “form”. Perhaps their most nefarious exercise in deceiving the world is the evil concoction known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

 The harm this antisemitic tract has caused since its publication in 1902-03 is incalculable. Adolf Hitler was enraged by it. The American automobile manufacturer, Henry Ford, was convinced by it, and caused hundreds-of-thousands of copies to be distributed throughout the United States. Even after the Second World War, the publication could be still be found in anti-Zionist bookshops across the Middle East. Tragically, the Internet has given the document a whole new audience to deceive.

 Millions of people around the world remain convinced that The Protocols is an accurate account of an actual secret meeting of Jewish leaders in a Prague graveyard. The purpose of this covert conclave? The systematic subjugation of the entire human race to the will of “International Jewry”.

 The true authors of The Protocols were agents of the Okhrana – the Tsarist Secret Police. Antisemitism was rife throughout the Russian Empire, especially in those parts of Eastern Europe where Jewish communities had, over many centuries, established themselves. Whipping up hatred of the Jews was a time-honoured way of diverting the anger of the Russian peasantry away from their aristocratic masters and onto their defenceless neighbours. The Protocols were created with the express purpose of fuelling that anger. Bloody pogroms followed its distribution in the first decade of the twentieth century.

 Not only did the “success” of The Protocols demonstrate the alarming effectiveness of propaganda based on conspiracy theories, but it also shows how little most people understand about the origins and purposes of the communications that excite and motivate them. Certainly, the lessons learned by the Tsar’s secret police were not lost on the secret policemen of the Soviet state which replaced the Russian Empire – nor on their successors in the security services of today’s Russian Federation.

 Not that the Russians are the only people capable of concocting and distributing disinformation. When it comes to the operations of the “Deep State”, Britain’s secret services have been practising the dark arts of deception since at least the sixteenth century.

 In 1924, for example, His Majesty’s spies concocted what became known as the “Zinoviev Letter”. This out-and-out forgery purported to prove that the Soviet Government, hand-in-glove with the Communist Party of Great Britain, was planning to take advantage of the recently-elected Labour Government’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union to step-up its revolutionary agitation throughout the British Isles. Published in the Tory-aligned Daily Mail, the Zinoviev Letter played a crucial role in bringing down Britain’s first Labour Government.

 There can be little doubt, however, that the British disinformers’ finest hour came as the British people battled on alone against the triumphant forces of the Nazi Reich. Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, knew that Hitler could only be defeated if the United States entered the war on Britain’s side. Accordingly, he and the secret services were prepared to throw everything they had into a top-secret struggle to persuade the American people to abandon their isolationism and join the fight against Hitler.

 Britain’s “man in New York” was a remarkable Canadian-born businessman, William Stephenson. From June 1940 until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, Stephenson oversaw an astonishing multi-million pound campaign of disinformation and media manipulation designed to change America’s mind about the war.

 Stephenson’s propaganda offensive, chronicled brilliantly by Henry Hemming in Our Man in New York: The British Plot to Bring America into the Second World War, involved fake news agencies distributing carefully-crafted fake news. It commissioned world-class forgers to produce bogus German plans for the subversion of South American governments. It infiltrated America’s leading polling agency where its agents were able to insert “useful” questions in its opinion surveys. Best of all, Stephenson was able to enlist the support of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the man who would later set up the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, Hemming makes a pretty strong case for the CIA, along with its forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services, being designed in London, by London, for London.

 In 1948, the newly-established CIA was ready to show its British teachers what an attentive pupil it had been. Determined to prevent the election of a Communist Party-led government in the Italian elections of that year, the CIA unleashed a no-holds-barred propaganda campaign designed to undermine the Italian Left and secure victory for the Christian Democratic Party and its backers in the Catholic Church and the Mafia. The CIA poured millions into US-controlled newspapers, US-influenced trade unions, and US-made newsreels – often featuring appeals from prominent Italian-Americans like Frank Sinatra to resist the communist menace!

 So, the next time the United States Congress complains long and loud about Russian interference in American elections, the rest of the world would be wise to pose the question: “What took Moscow so long?” After all, the American-designed-and-executed campaign to secure the re-election of the Russian Federation’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, took place in 1996! The Russians waited 20 years before using carefully-crafted propaganda and conspiracy theories to help secure the election of America’s worst president – Donald Trump.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 31 July 2020.