Trumpism: Then, Now—and in the Future?

 

Trumpism: Then, Now—and in the Future?

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness

Like it or not, Trump hit on a great truth that no country can write off its vast industrial interior, destroy its borders, or prefer managed decline over renewal, and meanwhile call itself moral.

What was, is, and will be the Trump agenda? 

Against all odds, what elected Trump in 2016 was a recalibration of American foreign and domestic policy—and the art of politicking itself.

Doctrine and Policy

In foreign affairs, the United States would no longer adhere to every aspect of the 75-year-old postwar order it created—given the world now bore little resemblance to the world of 1945. 

Prior bipartisan foreign policy had often ossified to the point of enhancing the power of our enemies, weakening our complacent friends, and terribly damaging our own power. When Trump entered office, ISIS was proving that it was hardly a “JV” organization. North Korea was recklessly testing missiles and bragging of its nuclear-tipped rockets pointed at our West Coast. 

Israel and the moderate Arab regimes were ostracized as part of the insane Obama empowerment of theocratic Iran and its quest for a radical crescent encompassing Syria, Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

Russian reset was an utter failure. Unhinged, we were hectoring Vladimir Putin on human rights while agreeing to dismantle missile defense in Europe, if he would just please behave for a bit, and give Obama space during his 2012 reelection bid. The Asian pivot was laughable. Our friendly and hostile trading partners praised the Obama Administration in direct proportion to their manipulation of it.

In the 1950s, it was understandable that the United States would spend blood and treasure abroad to resurrect the destroyed economies after World War II and contain Soviet Communism. Its policy of allowing recovering allies to run up huge trade deficits to reenter the world community was seen both as desirable and affordable, as was putting down Communist insurrections the world over to contain the Soviet Union. 

Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea became powerhouses, often with wide open, one-sided access to U.S. markets. China would never have achieved its 40-year stunning ascendence had America applied to Chinese trade the same mercantilism that China applied to the United States. 

By 2016, it was clear that a host of world and international trade and development organizations took for granted U.S. moral and financial support, while assuming wide open entrance for all into the U.S. market. 

The result of the globalist project was the destruction of much of the American interior’s manufacturing and assembly industries. Those whose labor could not be so easily xeroxed—Silicon Valley, Wall Street, banking and insurance, big law, the media, entertainment, professional sports, and large research universities—saw their markets expand to 7 billion consumers. Coastal elites got rich. Interior deplorables and clingers were said to have deserved their fate by not going to college or failing to learn how to code.  

They were lectured that not even a magic wand could save their jobs, or, in the words of Lawrence Summers, former Harvard president and the architect of President Obama’s team of economic advisers, they deserved their unfortunate fates, which in our meritocracy matched their meager abilities. “One of the challenges in our society is that the truth is a kind of disequalizer,”  Summers reportedly once said. “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.”. 

Into that comfortable matrix of easing into decline, Trump stormed in. He damned globalists as elites who cared more about abstractions abroad than unfairness and the poor at home right under their noses. 

To restore U.S. primacy, he greenlighted gas and oil production. When the United States became the largest producer of both, much of the world changed. The Middle East no longer had a political stranglehold over U.S. foreign policy. Russia, and illiberal regimes like Iran, lost hundreds of billions in carbon income. American consumers and industry enjoyed the cheapest energy prices in the Westernized world. And the elite dismissed all that as too damaging to the planet.

Tax reform and deregulation lured back to U.S. shores offshored money and opened up trillions of dollars for investment that had been inert—the owners of which had been understandably worried by the redistributionist rhetoric and policies of the increasingly leftwing second-term Obama Administration and its recalibration of the Democratic Party.

Closing the border with Mexico slowly tapered off the once-endless supplies of cheap imported labor. For the first time in a half-century, the American worker was courted by needy employers who paid record entry-level wages, as unemployment fell to near historic peacetime lows. 

Minority youth were no longer begging employers for a chance of a job, but rather were being begged by them to come to work. Ancient fights over unions and minimum wages faded as an increasingly wealthy America saw middle-class income soar for the first time in years as employers paid whatever was necessary to land American workers. 

Trump stopped most optional military interventions that did not pencil out in a cost-benefit advantage for the United States—or for regional stability. Instead, don’t-tread-on-me realism bombed ISIS out of existence and took out the terrorist Iranian mastermind Qasem Soleimani, or threatened Kim Jong-un with massive retaliation if he dared launch a missile toward the United States. 

At no time did Trump think he should remove Bashar al-Assad and try to create a Western democracy in Syria, or invade and overthrow the Iranian regime—as opposed to slowly strangle them with sanctions, new alliances, and military deterrence. There was no desire to return to spend money or lives in Libya or Iraq to establish or reboot democratic institutions.

There were two final pillars of the new Trump foreign policy. One was to talk honestly to allies about investing in their own defense as promised. Most not only counted on U.S. protection but often loudly seemed to resent their ensuing dependence by opportunistically ankle-biting the United States for its global policeman role. 

Western Europe and Asia, and especially Germany and Japan, were told that if Russia and China really were existential threats, then such front-line states had to commensurately invest in their own defense first—at least if they to expected 19-year-olds from rural Michigan or northern Florida to fly over to their defense.

Unpredictability was seen as safer deterrence in a dangerous world than predictable and ossified policy. 

So, against all advice, Trump called China to account for its commercial cheating and insidious infiltration into Western banking, corporate, media, entertainment, and academic institutions. He cut off aid to Palestinians who refused to recognize Israel, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, reminded the Assad regime that it would never recover the Golan Heights to launch another war on Israel, encouraged the moderate Arab world to ally with Israel to protect against revolutionary Shiite Iran, and reminded Canada and Mexico that one reason why they had small militaries, and growing economies, was their proximity to the United States—and thus such magnanimity should be reciprocated with symmetry rather than seen as naïveté that explained its continuance.

Class, Not Race

The second pillar of Trumpism was a shift in Republican orthodoxy to reemphasize class differences and in radically different ways. 

No longer was there talk of privatizing Social Security, institutionalizing free (but not fair) trade, or following international commercial accords against the interest of an increasingly hollowed out American middle class. Deregulation and cuts in corporate taxes galvanized the economy and indeed profits “trickled down” to the hoi polloi. But such necessary free-market reforms were not the be-all and end-all of Republican orthodoxy, which was now readjusted to be more in the interest of the factory worker, not just the Wall Street investor. 

Closing the border cut off the easy supply of cheap labor for corporations. Only that way would wages of entry-level and largely minority workers rise. More radially, Trumpism did not see the middle classes as spent, addicted, eroding and doomed, much less as deplorables, clingers, irredeemables, dregs, and chumps as the coastal elites increasingly liked to smear them. And Trump certainly did not see poor whites, without much influence, as privileged, and thus in need of making atonement for supposed sins of the past or the present. 

One reason why Trump is libeled as a racist is that he saw through the white elite con of blaming those without advantage for bias and prejudice, in order to win psychological exemption for the elite’s own near-monopoly on blue-chip university admissions, corporate, media and academic old-boy access and cultural influence. 

Bull-in-the-China-Shopism

Aside from fundamental changes in foreign and democratic policy, and renewed emphasis on class instead of race, Trumpism changed the political dialectic. 

Of course, Trump could be crude, even at times bullying and profane. But much of his braggadocio and vulgarity were designed as chemotherapy to kill the cancer of the administrative state and the lock-hold on permanent government by the revolving-door, bipartisan coastal elite. 

The reasons why Trump just days after his inauguration faced a failed impeachment, or calls for his removal by the 25th Amendment, or even talk of a military coup, or the Steele dossier hoax that led to a $40 million, 22-month effort by progressives to destroy his presidency, his person and his family, were manifold. But one cause surely was that Trump was orphaned from the hard-Left Democratic Party and the Republican establishment and seemed either to welcome the ostracism or not be fully cognizant of the cost that it entailed.  

True, Trump may have defined presidential comportment down with his “sleepy,” “crooked,” “lying,” and “low-energy” epithets and with his crowds cheering to “lock her up.” But then again, what was so moral in the past about mellifluously assuring Americans they would lose neither their doctor nor their health plan—to the amusement of the likes of Jonathan Gruber who knew all along that they would? Or ramming through the Iran Deal by bypassing the treaty duties of the U.S. Senate, while deluding the country with a “know-nothing” media echo chamber? If we learned anything from the Obama years, supposedly “scandal-free” presidents might do anything from weaponizing the IRS and siccing the FBI on opponents to dismantling viable allied missile defense to leverage foreign leaders to aid their reelection campaigns—and then call all that moral, with a chorus of media assent.

When a man takes on the role of the gunslinger arriving in the town to clean up the mess, one must expect that his methods and comportment will offend his supporters as much as they terrified his adversaries, all the more so as he succeeds and thus the beneficiaries see an end on the horizon to their embarrassing need to have called in the unorthodox to do what their own polite conventionality should have done, but choose not (or did not have the courage) to do. 

The Fate of Trumpism 

We can sense the viability of Trumpism by the current lack of coherent attacks on its principles and achievements. Would a President Mitt Romney demand that the U.S. embassy now leave Jerusalem? Would a President Nikki Haley cease the new containment of China? Would a President Marco Rubio return to the Bush-Obama coaxing of NATO partners to please, pretty please pay up what they had promised?

Or alternatively, would a President Joe Biden warn the Arab countries to cease their “destabilizing” new partnership with Israel? 

Would he jawbone them to return the autocratic Palestinians to front and center of the Middle East “peace” plan? Would a President Biden begin dismantling 400 miles of border wall and return to open borders?

At home, Biden most certainly would raise taxes, restore cumbersome regulations, strangle the fossil fuel industry, and return to identity politics pandering. But after the 2017-20 Trump boom, he would do so without any expectation that the economy would grow or the country would heal or the world would suddenly cool down and the seas cease to rise. 

Biden knows that under Obama a natural recovery stagnated, a uniter president ignited the country with his team of racial arsonists, and the government wasted billions of dollars in green boondoggles even as a hamstrung private sector did far more than Washington to expand the use of solar energy and electric cars. 

And what about the NeverTrumper—always wrong that Trump would not be nominated or not be elected or be destroyed by “Russian collusion”? At the end of Trump, whether in 2020 and 2024, would they resurrect the Weekly Standard or return to the Sunday talk shows? Would the legions of handlers, operatives and advisors return to recalibrate all the party Senate and House races along the lines of a Mitt Romney or John McCain orthodoxy? Would the NeverTrump Phoenix arise to save the Republican Party from the ashes of Trumpism—on the principle that deplorables would always support RINO candidates, but RINOS would bolt the minute a deplorable candidate appeared. Could a Jeff Flake or a Ben Sasse or a John Kasich candidacy shatter the Blue Wall?

Probably not at all. Elite Republicanism would fail because the white working classes would return either to political hibernation in the swing states or rejoin the Democratic Party. Growing minority support would vanish because blacks and Latinos would see platitudinous and pandering Republicans as far more injurious to their futures than was a crudely talking, Queens-accented populist Trump.

Trumpism did not dismantle Republican conservatism. It simply enhanced conservative appeal by closing the border, confronting China, demanding fair trade, avoiding optional military expeditions, emphasizing the concerns of the working class, and redefining presidential behavior as boisterously honoring promises rather than mellifluously reneging on them. 

Whatever Trump’s fate, the NeverTrump faction will not succeed in rebuilding a new-old Republican Party under the Bush-McCain-Romney paradigm. Biden and his leftist masters would not be able to lower minority unemployment to Trump levels. Neither would they declare an end to containing China and claim such past confrontation was an unnecessary provocation. 

Like it or not, Trump hit on a great truth that no leader can write off his country’s vast industrial interior, destroy his nation’s borders, willingly cede global leadership to a Communist dictatorship, manipulate intelligence agencies to destroy political opponents, prefer to manage decline rather than to seek renewal, and meanwhile, as he did all that, call himself moral and presidential.

Fear and loathing in the Biden Crime Family

Starting to feel sorry for slow Joe... some legacy! Not a bad guy

in a creepy, sleazy kind of way...

Fear and loathing in the Biden Crime Family

Howie Carr, Boston Herald

“I have no response.”

That was Dementia Joe Biden’s response Friday when he was finally asked about the devastating expose of his son Hunter’s emails and so much more.

Those revelations included the crack-addled Hunter whining to one of his daughters that he has to pay 50% of all the cash he collects to “Pop,” and that as part of a shady Chinese deal, the so-called “remuneration package” would include “10 held by H for the Big Guy.”

“I have no response,” the Big Guy told a CBS reporter. “It’s another smear campaign, right up your alley.”

But he didn’t deny it. Biden — or more precisely, his keepers — haven’t disputed the veracity of the Biden Crime Family documents, or that they are from Hunter’s laptop. They were obtained legally, after an “inebriated” Hunter abandoned the computer at a repair shop, according to the New York Post.

The usual alt-left suspects — the AP, NBC “News,” Rep. Adam Schiff — went through the tired motions of trying to blame it all on, who else, the Russians. But seriously, how many times can these hacks cry wolf, even to Wolf Blitzer?

Dementia Joe’s keepers have always understood that Hunter was capable of getting Pop into this kind of a jam. That’s how far gone Hunter Biden is.

Which is why last year they commissioned one of their Democrat stenographers with a press pass to try to inoculate the campaign. The Bidens ordered up a sob story about Hunter in one of their party organs called The New Yorker.

At the beginning, the obsequious scribe engaged in that Democrat tradition of projection, accusing the Republicans of everything he was up to, “promoting, without evidence, the dubious narrative that Biden used the office of the Vice-President to advance and protect hisson’s interests.”

Dubious? Again, Biden hasn’t denied anything. Without evidence? Ditto. And as we know now, it’s not just his son’s interests “Pop” is protecting — Hunter told his own kid he’s kicking up half to the old man.

In mob parlance, Hunter’s an “earner.”

Actually, in the context of the modern-day Ministry of Truth that the alt-left media has become, the Hunter Biden Agonistes are somewhat amusing.

Consider that he shares a first name with Hunter S. Thompson, the so-called gonzo journalist who was, like Hunter Biden, an alcoholic and a drug addict.

In one of his more famous books, Thompson recounts driving a rented car through the Nevada desert while on drugs.

“And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooning and screeching and diving around the car.”

Forty years later, Hunter Biden was in a rented car (in which he would later leave a crack pipe) out on the same desert at night, stoned out of his own mind.

“A large barn owl flew over the hood of the car and seemed to follow him … He said that he has no idea whether the owl was real or a hallucination.”

What is Hunter’s background, you ask? How could he get himself into such a situation, with his father’s political opponents in possession of damning evidence of corruption, not to mention apparent pornography. (The subpoena for Hunter’s hard drive was signed by an FBI agent who has been described in the press as a specialist in crimes involving child pornography.)

Hunter seems to have spent time in half the high-end rehab centers in the U.S. Here’s a selection, from last year’s puff piece in The New Yorker:

“(He) soon admitted himself to Crossroads Centre Antigua for a month … he returned to Crossroads Centre … In July 2014, he went to a clinic in Tijuana that provided a treatment using ibogaine, a psychoactive alkaloid … which is illegal in America.”

Ibogaine — another link to Hunter S. Thompson. In 1972, Thompson introduced the drug to America by falsely accusing another Democrat presidential candidate, Ed Muskie, a colleague of Joe Biden’s, of going berserk on the campaign trail after overdosing on ibogaine.

“He looked out at the crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people.”

Back to Hunter Biden’s curriculum vitae: “He enrolled as an outpatient at the Charles O’Brien Center for Addiction Treatment at the University of Pennsylvania.”

That’s where his father falsely claims to be a professor, you may recall.

“He then enrolled in an inpatient program for executives at Caron Treatment Centers, where he used the pseudonym Hunter Smith. … In February 2016 he enrolled in yet another addiction-treatment program, run by the Kolmac Outpatient Recovery Center. … That fall Hunter made plans to go to the Grace Grove Lifestyle Center in Sedona, AZ.”

You can see why all these foreign oligarchs would be falling all over themselves to offer such an extinguished, I mean distinguished, person such outlandish sums — $1 million a year from Burisma, $10 million a year from a Chinese company “just for introductions,” another “850” for Hunter, not to mention, of course, the 10 for “the Big Guy.”

In The New Yorker piece last year, Hunter tells his adoring hagiographer, “I’ve pretty much always lived paycheck to paycheck.”

Of course he has. In her divorce petition, his first wife said Hunter was “spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations) while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.”

There’s more, so much more, and it’ll be all coming out this week, with many more references to “Pop.” And what can Pop say beyond, “I have no response.”

Somebody pass the ibogaine.

Joe Biden, the Iraq War, and Stolen Valor

 

Joe Biden, the Iraq War, and Stolen Valor

Anonymous Iraq Veteran

In 2011 – nine (9) years ago -- the Iraq government awarded the first Iraq Commitment Medal to then-Vice President Joe Biden.

 

It was a symbolic gesture as Baghdad intended that the medal would be awarded to all thousands and thousands of Americans who served honorably in Iraq.

 

So what did Joe Biden do?

 

Did he give the medal to an unknown family of one of us who served in Iraq and gave the last full measure of devotion to the United States of America? No!

 

Did he give the medal to one of us served, shed their blood, and was awarded the Purple Heart Medal? No!

 

And when he got home nine years ago, did he push for the medal he kept to be issued to the thousands and thousands of veterans of the Iraq War? No!

 

Instead, Joe Biden kept it for himself and forgot about everyone else. 

In the Marine Corps we stick to the motto “Semper Fidelis” even if it means marching into the halls of Hell for our fellow Marines and have a nasty slang term for Joe Biden's kind of selfish behavior: 

Semper Me! It means looking our for Number 1 and for everyone else: So sad—too bad! 

 

Joe Biden just kept the medal for himself…the absolute epitome of stolen valor!

Dezinformatsiya

 

Dezinformatsiya

Jay Nordinger, National Review

On Russia’s (one-sided) disinformation war

The Russian government has various means of attack: assassination, invasion, annexation. But don’t forget dezinformatsiya, i.e., disinformation, which the Kremlin has practiced for almost a hundred years. A special disinformation office was set up in 1923.

“Misinformation” is an innocent mistake: You report that Mr. Smith lives on Elm Street when he in fact lives on Maple Street. On learning of this error, you correct it. “Disinformation” is not innocent. It is a lie, intended to achieve a political end.

Recently, I talked with two experts on the subject: Jamie Fly and Thomas Kent. The former is a veteran foreign-policy official and think-tanker; the latter is a veteran newsman. Both are American. And both are former presidents of RFE/RL, that combination of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. In September, Fly gave testimony on disinformation before Congress; Kent has gone and written a book — Striking Back: Overt and Covert Options to Combat Russian Disinformation.

Russia is not the Soviet Union, thank heaven. But some things have carried over, including disinformation. “The skills were retained,” says Tom Kent, and “the understanding of information as a tool of state policy remains the same.”

It is just a tool, mind you. “There is nothing sentimental about information,” says Kent — not in the eyes of the Russian government. It is one more means of accomplishing a goal. Another tool in the toolkit, or weapon in the arsenal.

Disinformation is a cheap weapon, too. “They used to say that chemical weapons were the poor man’s atomic bomb,” Kent notes. “Maybe information weapons are the poor man’s chemical weapons.”

Not that the Kremlin has been shy about using chemical weapons. In March 2018, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were victims of Novichok; in August of this year, Alexei Navalny was the victim of the same. All of them survived, amazingly. (Dawn Sturgess, a British woman who was a collateral victim of the attack on the Skripals, did not.)

One question is, why would Russia want to engage in an information, or disinformation, war? That is a complicated question, in addition to a good one, and a proper answer would require a book or two. Suffice it to say now: Russia is down in the world, with its empire lost, its population draining away, and its economy weak. If Russia wants to trip up the West, there is hardly a better way than disinformation, with the strife it sows.

But why would Russia want to trip up the West, when there are so many problems at home — on Russian soil — to tackle? This one, we will have to leave to those books, and in particular their psychological analyses.

Speaking of books, here is a passage from Tom Kent’s:

Russia recognized that the speed of social and economic change in the West had left millions feeling frightened by globalization, unmoored in society and abandoned by their nations’ elites. People were looking for a way to make sense of it all. The situation was ideal for Russian information operators promoting conspiracy theories and grievance.

The author continues,

Russia discovered that the information technology created by democratic societies provided an ideal platform for this work. No longer did it have to depend on unreliable leftist parties in the West, or hope people were listening to Radio Moscow through a scratchy ionosphere. Facebook allowed Russian operators to microtarget any segment of Western populations they wanted.

In Cold War days — when Facebook was just a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes, or when he was just a gleam in his parents’ eyes — Soviet disinformation specialists had some great successes. These included the AIDS hoax: the contention that this virus was concocted by the U.S. government for the purpose of decimating black Americans, along with gays, intravenous-drug users, and other “undesirables.” Many Americans bought this, including celebrities such as Spike Lee. The effects of this lie linger to this day.

These days, Russian disinformationists are apt to say that a NATO soldier, in a Baltic state or elsewhere, raped a local girl. But viruses have come roaring back into the picture, or at least one has.

Shortly into the current pandemic, the U.S. State Department issued a report saying that Russia, China, and Iran — a natural axis — were putting out a line: The coronavirus is an American bioweapon. Moscow’s disinformation artists have been keen to say that U.S. soldiers, serving in NATO units, are spreading the virus. One Russian TV network — Zvezda, operated by the ministry of defense — alleged that Bill Gates was behind it all.

As Jamie Fly points out, the pandemic is a playground for disinformationists. Authoritarian regimes can distract from their own failures — public-health and otherwise — by assigning blame to democracies, chiefly the United States. Russia has also seized the chance to pit allies against one another.

For example, Russian disinformationists put out the word that Poland was preventing Russian supplies from reaching Italy. This was early in the pandemic, when Italy was especially hard hit. The supplies were masks, ventilators, and the like. The Russian-planted stories were false, but they succeeded in creating anger and suspicion in Italy.

One big difference between the information war of yore and the information war now is speed. It took a while for Moscow’s AIDS hoax to build. It started in an Indian newspaper (the Patriot) and went from there, newspaper to newspaper, until Spike Lee and the rest were amplifying it. Now, Russia “bombards” you with disinformation, as Fly says, in a “constant assault.” Central and Eastern European countries are particular targets.

Thomas Kent quotes Jonathan Swift: “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.”

From no single office does all disinformation flow. As Kent writes, “the Kremlin grants substantial freedom to a dizzying variety of government agencies, oligarchs, social-media influencers, populist haranguers and for-profit entrepreneurs to create information products that serve Kremlin interests.”

Nor is Moscow pushing a single line, or ideology, or point of view. In Argentina, Russian disinformationists are happy to align with Peronistas on the left and religious conservatives on the right. In the United States, they are happy to support Black Lives Matter and to oppose it. What they are after is strife. Confusion. The sharpening of divisions.

It is not so much that they are pushing an alternative truth, or a version of the truth. They are trying to cloud the very concept of the truth — the truth as something knowable. One “narrative” is as good as another, you see. Who’s to say what’s true?

In 2017, Sir Roger Scruton wrote,

The concept of truth has been the victim of massive cyber-attacks in recent decades, and it has not yet recovered. The most recent attack has come from social media, which have turned the Internet into one great seething cauldron of opinions, most of them anonymous, in which every kind of malice and fantasy swamps the still small voice of humanity and truth.

In Striking Back, Tom Kent says that Russia’s disinformationists are not “ideologically picky.” They will do whatever benefits the Kremlin, and that thing is usually strife, or chaos. But there is “one constant”: Moscow “paints the world as divided into good and evil camps.”

In Europe, for example,

the narrative usually is a populist one where the good camp consists of ordinary people, working hard for a living and unashamed of their patriotism, their values and their borders. The evil camp consists of politically correct liberals beholden to national and EU elites, divorced from the common man and eager to “replace” him with impoverished immigrants (whose arrival they encourage by bombing their homelands).

Disinformationists are not necessarily blunt propagandists, or blowhards. They can be sly. In St. Petersburg — not Florida! — the “Internet Research Agency” created an “American” named “Jenna Abrams,” who attracted a big following on Twitter. Jenna started out dissecting Kim Kardashian’s fashion choices. But “once her numbers reached a high level,” says Kent, “her tweets swung to the political, taking on a right-wing, anti-immigrant tone.”

And if the disinformationists think a left-wing, pro-immigrant tone will do the trick, they’ll adopt one. Again, not “picky.”

So, who is pushing back against Russian disinformation? Anyone? Some governments are good at it, particularly those of the three Baltic republics and Sweden. They have had long experience of harassment (or worse) from Moscow. The British government is good at it too. For other governments, matters are more complicated. Italy’s, for example, has elements that are frankly pro-Kremlin.

Then there are “elves.” Santa’s helpers? No, more like democracy’s helpers. “Elves” is the nickname for voluntary organizations and individual volunteers who take it upon themselves to counter disinformation, in whatever ways they can. They go into the chatrooms, etc., to do battle. They point out the corruption of the Russian government. And they argue for democratic values over authoritarian ones. “Elves” are especially prominent, and effective, in Lithuania.

Many are the “NGAs,” as Tom Kent calls them: “non-government actors.” One such is Bellingcat, a collective of researchers in about 20 countries. The name comes from the phrase “belling the cat,” which derives from an ancient fable. The mice wonder how to protect themselves from the cat. If it had a bell around its neck, that would help a lot. But who among them is willing to bell the cat? He who does it takes on a dangerous responsibility for the good of all.

Last year, Bellingcat won a European Press Prize for identifying the agents who carried out the Skripal attack.

In the United States, there was the AMWG — Active Measures Working Group — established in 1981, the first year of the Reagan administration. Its mission was to counter Soviet disinformation. It was duly disbanded in 1992. In 2016, when old things were new again, the Global Engagement Center was established in the State Department. Its mission is the old one: countering Moscow’s disinformation.

The United States has often been sleepy about this disinformation, but we Yanks have our moments. In 2014, the State Department put out a fact sheet, listing ten false claims by Vladimir Putin. Its introduction began,

As Russia spins a false narrative to justify its illegal actions in Ukraine, the world has not seen such startling Russian fiction since Dostoyevsky wrote, “The formula ‘two times two equals five’ is not without its attractions.”

The “radios” — RFE/RL, in particular — did critical work in the Cold War. Asked about the importance of the radios to the Solidarity movement in Poland, Lech Walesa said, “Would there be an earth without the sun?” RFE/RL is doing critical work today, too. This past August, in Minsk, democracy protesters stood outside state-media headquarters and chanted, “Radio Svaboda! Radio Svaboda!” (their way of saying “Radio Liberty”).

Bravely, many state-media employees quit their jobs, refusing to convey lies. The Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, asked the Kremlin for “teams” of journalists, or “journalists,” to replace them. The Kremlin obliged, in what has been called a “surge”: a surge of disinformation artists.

Their handiwork can be seen in the following words about protesters: “Paid-off scum who refer to themselves as ‘the people’ are ready for $20 to sell their own mothers. Now they want to return to our streets, to dismantle everything we’ve spent so many years building.”

Though we Yanks have our moments, we are falling badly, badly behind in the information war, as Jamie Fly warns. We — not just the United States, but democracies and friends of democracy in general — are being outspent and outmaneuvered. We are barely in the game, barely participating.

Fly, Kent, and others point out a curiosity: In a war, you usually try to fight on your opponent’s territory, not yours. Yet this war is being fought almost entirely in the West, in the democracies. We take what defensive actions we can. What about “surging” information to the Russian people themselves, and to other people who are routinely misled by their state media?

RT and Sputnik — two Kremlin propaganda outlets — are available in the United States. Western outlets are not granted licenses in Russia. Should the U.S. government, or others, demand reciprocity? A level playing field, if you will?

There are objections to this approach: to the whole idea of broadcasting, or “messaging,” or “providing content,” to the Russian people. (1) We should not stoop to propaganda. (2) Who are we to preach, with all our problems? (3) Better not to poke the bear.

As to the first objection: Simple, truthful information is always helpful to people, and so is a variety of (honest) views. There is nothing dark or propagandistic about offering people a good-faith media alternative. It is also important to counter lies — blatant lies, not mere shades of opinion. As to the third objection: The bear is already aroused — obviously — and poking, or not poking, has nothing to do with it. The bear wakes up aroused, so to speak. It is not reacting, and it is not a victim.

Now to the second objection: Who are we to preach, with all our problems? Many, many Americans and other Westerners express this view — in high places and low.

Here is a single example from Donald Trump. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he was asked about Erdogan and the suppression of civil liberties in Turkey. Trump answered, “When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.”

Needless to say, democracies have problems, there being no paradise on earth. But democrats have a great and welcome story to tell — and no one is more receptive to democracy and its values than people who live in authoritarian countries.

Whatever the failings of the democracies, Tom Kent observes, “the universe is not righted by letting the duplicity and destructiveness of Russian IOs reign unchallenged.” (By “IOs,” he means “information operations.”)

He also writes,

Few people would condemn an aggressive, fact-based government campaign for people not to text while driving. Is it different if the campaign promotes the values of free societies, and calls out those that trade in corruption and tyranny? To me, both campaigns are moral and acceptable.

Hard as it may be to believe, democratic values have to be argued for, generation after generation. Their opponents are tireless in arguing against them, or smearing them. If democrats were half as bold and energetic as anti-democrats, the world would be a brighter place.

In Striking Back, Kent quotes Dmitri Teperik, the chief executive of Estonia’s International Center for Defense and Security. Teperik advocates a “ruthless projection of truth” to the Russian people. That is an inspired, and inspiring, phrase: “ruthless projection of truth.” Jamie Fly, too, spoke of truth in his recent congressional testimony, citing Vaclav Havel — who grasped that truth is what authoritarians fear most, because it is a liberator of the human spirit.

Tanks, nukes, diplomacy, and many other things matter greatly in world affairs. But information and disinformation — these things are not to be ignored, because they move minds and therefore events, for better or worse.

JAY NORDLINGER is a senior editor of National Review and a book fellow at the National Review Institute. @jaynordlinger

Chris Wray Is Right: Antifa Is an Ideological Threat to the United States

 Chris Wray Is Right: Antifa Is an Ideological Threat to the United States

Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review

His assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on the very real and present threat of ideologically driven violence.

On Thursday, Jim Geraghty had a characteristically insightful Corner post discussing FBI director Christopher Wray’s recent characterization of Antifa on Capitol Hill. Jim observes that the director’s testimony will be (indeed, is being) distorted in the debate halls, congressional chambers, and media commentary because, well, that’s what we do.

The rap on Wray is that he resists framing Antifa as an “organization,” thinking it more accurate to depict it as a “movement” or an “ideology.” The problem is not just that he is being maligned for what was a more nuanced and accurate description than the commentary indicates. Beyond that, the commentary is missing entirely that his assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on ideologically driven violence, which has been the most immediate threat faced by the United States for a generation. If the government is applying to international terrorism — i.e., jihadist terrorism — the same thinking that Wray described as the bureau’s approach to Antifa’s domestic terrorism, that is a significant security enhancement.

Wray is not denying that Antifa is infecting and driving violent anti-American anarchists. Those anarchists, he indicated, include collections that range from ad hoc groups of individuals who self-identify as Antifa to more regimented “nodes” that are “coalescing regionally.”

 FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on “Threats to the Homeland” on Capitol Hill, September 24, 2020. (Joshua Roberts/Pool/Reuters)

His assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on the very real and present threat of ideologically driven violence.

On Thursday, Jim Geraghty had a characteristically insightful Corner post discussing FBI director Christopher Wray’s recent characterization of Antifa on Capitol Hill. Jim observes that the director’s testimony will be (indeed, is being) distorted in the debate halls, congressional chambers, and media commentary because, well, that’s what we do.

The rap on Wray is that he resists framing Antifa as an “organization,” thinking it more accurate to depict it as a “movement” or an “ideology.” The problem is not just that he is being maligned for what was a more nuanced and accurate description than the commentary indicates. Beyond that, the commentary is missing entirely that his assessment marks a dramatic improvement in the FBI’s position on ideologically driven violence, which has been the most immediate threat faced by the United States for a generation. If the government is applying to international terrorism — i.e., jihadist terrorism — the same thinking that Wray described as the bureau’s approach to Antifa’s domestic terrorism, that is a significant security enhancement.

Wray is not denying that Antifa is infecting and driving violent anti-American anarchists. Those anarchists, he indicated, include collections that range from ad hoc groups of individuals who self-identify as Antifa to more regimented “nodes” that are “coalescing regionally.”

Does that sound familiar? It should. On a global stage, it mirrors in many ways the Muslim Brotherhood. Not a precise reflection, but it is similar (and bear in mind that these movements are in very different stages of their historical development).

I wrote a book about Brotherhood ideology, called The Grand Jihad, in 2010, and another one a couple of years later, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, about the turbulent influence of that ideology during the short-lived uprisings known as “the Arab Spring.” Over the years, I’ve consulted with sundry lawmakers on legislative initiatives to designate the Brotherhood formally as a foreign terrorist organization.

Those efforts were mostly inchoate, and they have petered out in recent years. The failure owes not to the fact that anyone doubts the Brotherhood is real, nor to skepticism that it is a malign force. The problem is nailing down exactly what it is. It manifests itself in many different ways.

The Brotherhood was established in Egypt nearly a century ago as an Islamic competitor to the Muslim world’s various post–World War II lurches toward secularization, Western democracy, and Soviet communism. In Egypt, the Brotherhood was an organization that, by turns, was overt in the manner of a political party, and covert in the manner of a subversive conspiracy.

Over time, it spread regionally and transcontinentally, metastasizing into the most consequential Muslim ideological enterprise in modern history. It adheres to a distinct sharia-supremacist Salafism rooted in centuries of scholarship. I’m not invoking “Salafist” here as an epithet, the way it is commonly used in media — the same way “Wahhabist” was used as an epithet meaning “radical” in the years after 9/11, usually by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. The Brotherhood is also supple, particularly in the West: media savvy, versed in civil-rights law, schooled in identity politics and community-organizing tactics, and strategically aligned with leftist grievance groups. That’s a level of sophistication that Antifa lacks in these early years of its existence. (Black Lives Matter, with its roots in 1960s “small-c communism,” is further along.)

Here is the point: The Brotherhood appears as different things in different places. It has countless tentacles, but most of them are not called “the Muslim Brotherhood.” Some are terrorist organizations, like Hamas (which would tell you it is not a terrorist organization but a political entity with a social-justice agenda and a forcible resistance wing). Some are think tanks, like the International Institute of Islamic Thought. Some are self-styled civil-rights groups, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Some are umbrella groups for all manner of sharia-supremacist activism, like the Islamic Society of North America. Some form up in campus chapters, as parts of the Muslim Students Association. Some, like the Muslim American Society, purport to be the quasi-official presence of the Brotherhood’s Egyptian mother ship. But what the Brotherhood is, for the most part, is a movement that propagates a particular ideology, and that inspires to action everyone from terrorists (such as the Blind Sheikh, Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda’s current leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, all of whom had Brotherhood alliances) to celebrity academics (such as Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna) to internationally renowned sharia authorities (such as Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi).

To label the Muslim Brotherhood a mere “organization,” as if it would be possible to target one iteration of it and put the whole thing out of business, would be to underestimate it at our peril. Indeed, the problem with the American government’s approach to Brotherhood-inspired entities in our own country has been the failure to come to grips with the ideology they represent and facilitate. Our officials tend to take them on their own masquerading terms, as if, say, CAIR really were just a civil-rights organization. Thus, the government rationalizes working with these groups as organizations rather than rejecting them because of the movement they represent.

Regarding Antifa, what Wray appears to be saying is that, if the FBI is going to counter Antifa effectively, it has to recognize, first and foremost, the ideological thread that knits all the militants together. You can’t kill it by arresting ten guys in balaclavas mixing Molotov cocktails in Portland.

If that is the FBI’s logic, it’s not only right; it is progress.

In the Obama years, the government’s willful blindness to the ideological driver of jihadist terrorism was taken to new and absurd extremes. Our officials were cautioned that to take note of sharia supremacism was unconstitutional folly, potentially chilling religious liberty and the rights to assemble and engage in political dissent. It was as if CAIR were writing policy when, as I’ve pointed out a few times, the actual constitutional violation was the administration-backed U.N. Human Rights Resolution 16/18, which attempted to outlaw speech that, even if true and backed by mounds of evidence, could “incite hostility” to Islam.

That, however, was not nearly the worst of it. Obama wanted to project success in quelling the threat of terrorism, even as al-Qaeda thrived and its breakaway faction, ISIS, went on a rampage that gained it control of a swath of Iraqi-Syrian territory larger than Britain. The administration did this by miniaturizing the threat: pretending the animating sharia-supremacist ideology did not exist, and treating the nodes of the terror networks as discrete organizations that were really concerned with regional and local disputes — not anything so bold as global anti-American, anti-Western jihad to establish and expand the dominance of sharia laws and customs.

Like jihad, mujahideen, and other Islamic terms whose utterance in connection with terrorism was verboten, discussion of sharia in connection with Muslim militancy was discouraged. It became vogue to speak of “al-Qaeda ideology.” That is, if a person who was clearly inspired by sharia supremacism committed a mass-murder attack, the Obama administration — very much including the FBI — ludicrously refused to concede that the act was terrorism unless there was some solid evidence “operationally” tying the person to an al-Qaeda entity that had been formally designated as a terrorist organization.

The knock-on effects of consciously avoiding ideology include limiting what the government can legitimately investigate. That approach is an invitation to be attacked: The terrorist is never a terrorist until the government has gotten around to designating him as such, and the threat of violence is never certain until after the violence happens.

Let’s not do that again. In fact, let’s bear in mind that, if Joe Biden is elected, we will be doing it again — instead of confronting enemy ideology, we’ll be back to “countering violent extremism.”

Chris Wray is right. He is not saying that the FBI is making no cases on violent insurrectionists who are driven by Antifa’s anti-American ideology. He is saying that if we’re confronted by a movement, and we want to protect the country, we can’t afford to delude ourselves into thinking we can beat it by taking out any particular organization. It’s bigger and more insidious than that.

Let’s remember one more thing, a lesson we never learned with sharia supremacism. The FBI is a law enforcement agency. It does not, and must not, get involved with ideological threats in the United States until they’ve ripened into crimes — or, at least, into concrete preparation for crimes and conspiracies. That is the end stage. A confident, free society best takes on ideological threats at the early stage: talking about them, examining their ideas, doing real investigative journalism about how they operate, and calling them out and discrediting them. If we’re waiting for the FBI to confront the challenge of anti-American anarchism, then we’re waiting way too long.

 

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy