Once you understand how corporate state propaganda works, and what the power elite intends with its perennial resort to the Russia fake news narrative, the programming becomes obvious. A few days ago Attorney General Merrick Garland outlined a sophisticated disinformation campaign undertaken by Russia to interfere with the US presidential election. Garland warned that Russia is pumping lies into the United States using fake news outlets and “right wing” social media influencers, among them Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin.
The Department of Justice reported that it has charged two employees of a Russian state-controlled media outlet, RT, who are alleged to have paid influencers ten million dollars to distribute content with “hidden Russian government messaging.” The 2024 narrative is much the same as the 2020 and 2016 narrative. A September 2020 story “How to Combat Russian Disinformation in the US Presidential Election,” published on the Columbia University news page, well illustrates the two previous points on the propaganda timeline: “As in 2016, Russia is looking to intensify whatever can further divide American society. The Kremlin isn’t ideological. Its outlets have agitated for and against the Black Lives Matter movement, for and against vaccinations, and boosted Bernie Sanders when he seemed to be splitting the Democratic Party. The Russian goal is simply to encourage any force that can add stress to US politics and society.”
“The Justice Department’s message is clear,” Garland told those assembled: “We have no tolerance for attempts by authoritarian regimes to exploit our democratic system of government. We will be relentlessly aggressive in countering and disrupting attempts by Russia and Iran, as well as China or any other foreign malign actor, to interfere in our elections and undermine our democracy.”
The corporate state propaganda organ NPR dutifully ran the headline “DOJ says Russia paid right-wing influencers to spread Russian propaganda.” The host, Scott Simon, reported, “The US Justice Department said this week Russia is trying to use fake news to influence US policy and politics.” Then he defined “fake news” for the viewer: “That’s fraudulent news stories made to look real.” He next turned to a usual suspect, Renee DiResta, “a disinformation expert who has been called upon by Congress for her expertise.”
DiResta, who wrote Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, published this past June to rave reviews, says that government official are “trying to create just a general resilience by helping people understand that these kinds of messages, particularly when they’re repeated, particularly when they’re pervasive and they’re all around you, are used to turn other people into enemies and to create social divisions that really undermine the ability to reach consensus and solve collective problems, that really increase and exacerbate polarization.”
What does “general resilience” mean? The industry term for this is “prebunking.” DiResta is defining it for listeners. Here’s how it works: corporate state programmers prepare people to disbelieve anything they hear that sounds like what the programmers have identified as coming from Russian agents. This mind control trick involves sensitizing targets—the general population in this case—to specific content their brains will automatically interpret and reject as Russian “disinformation” or “fake news.” The word “general” is crucial here, since most of what will be coded as Russian disinformation is not the work of Russian agents but arguments coming from the side the Establishment is seeking to discredit and marginalize, obviously Donald Trump and information supporting his candidacy. The design is to make information and opinion that’s generated internal to the Untied States appear to be externally produced, i.e., to make the organic appear artificial or synthetic.
For example, if I make the argument that immigrants are replacing American workers (which I did a few days ago), and the public is told that Russian agents manufactured that narrative to make immigrants appear to be enemies of native born workers, then a portion of my readers will regard information about the mass immigration as Russian propaganda and therefore fake news and conclude that immigration is not harmful to the interests of native born workers and their family. Or suppose one is skeptical of the proxy war in Ukraine. Like me. If one hears a story about how some of the Ukrainian soldiers are neo-Nazis but has been conditioned to believe such a story is Russian disinformation, then the person will be more likely to disbelieve the neo-Nazi story and then either support Western funding of the proxy war or at least be ambivalent about it.
The Russian fake news narration tells Americans that criticisms of Harris-Walz, support for Trump-Vance, the funding of the proxy war in Ukraine, concern about free speech, etc., may be the work of Russian propagandists designed to undermine the narrative generated by the power elite, who are promoting Harris-Walz, portraying Trump as the enemy of democracy, promoting neoconservative foreign policy and more aggressive censorship, etc., the opposite of what the other side represents.
Remember when fifty-one top intelligence officials circulated a letter misleading the public about Hunter Biden’s laptop, telling them that it was Russia disinformation? On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published a report detailing how Hunter Biden used the position and influence of his father, now-President Joe Biden, for personal gain with the apparent awareness of President Biden. Within days, top former intelligence officials signed on to a public statement, released October 19, 2020, stating that the Hunter Biden laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The purpose of the letter was so that when the public learned about the laptop and saw its contents they would assume the emails and photographs were fabricated by Russian agents. This is prebunking.
It is also election interference. The letter was coordinated by the Biden campaign. Top Biden campaign official, and now Secretary of State, Antony Blinken contacted former Deputy Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Michael Morell to arrange for the letter. Morell assembled the intelligent officials. The letter was signed by fifty former senior intelligence officials alleging that the laptop was potentially tied to Russian disinformation efforts. Some of the notable signatories included John Brennan, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Michael Hayden, former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Leon Panetta, former Director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense, James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines – Former Deputy Director of the CIA. This was a Deep State influence operation, carried out not against America’s adversaries on foreign soil, but against the American people, designed to interfere with the 2020 election.
The Russian fake news narrative is not content-neutral but functions to pump anti-Trump and anti-populism into mass consciousness disguised as the government protecting the public from Russian disinformation. The ruse means to make political arguments appear to not originate from genuine disagreement over issues, but to be artificially constructed and conveyed, and to make those who are critical of the power elite appear unhinged and easily duped. Only those who accept the official narrative pumped out by the corporate state media apparatus are portrayed as sane and rational. This is industrial-strength psychological warfare—and it’s being waged on the American public by their own government. NPR is a CIA cutout that functions to make the propaganda appear as journalism.
freedom and reason 