The Russian Propaganda Attack on America

06.09.2024 02:08

The Atlantic

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When people think of the world of espionage, they probably imagine glamorous foreign capitals, suave undercover operators, and cool gadgets. The reality is far more pedestrian: Yesterday, the Justice Department revealed an alleged Russian scheme to pay laundered money to American right-wing social-media trolls that seems more like a bad sitcom pitch than a top-notch intelligence operation.

According to a federal indictment unsealed yesterday, two Russian citizens, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, worked with a Tennessee company not named in the indictment but identified in the press as likely to be Tenet Media, owned by the conservative entrepreneurs Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan. The Russians work for RT, a Kremlin-controlled propaganda outlet; they are accused of laundering nearly $10 million and directing the money to the company.

Chen and Donovan then allegedly used most of that money to pay for content from right-wing social-media influencers including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Lauren Southern, and Benny Johnson. Unless you’ve spent time sloshing around in some of the dumber wading pools of the internet, you may not have heard of these people, but they have several million followers among them.

So far, Pool, Rubin, and Johnson claim that they had no idea what was going on, and have even asserted that they’re the real victims here. On one level, it’s not hard to believe that someone like Pool was clueless about who he was working for, especially if you’ve seen any of his content; these people are not exactly brimming with nuanced insights. (As the legal commentator Ken White dryly observed in a post on Bluesky: “Saying Tim Pool did something unwittingly is a tautology.”) And even without this money, some of them were likely to make the same divisive, pro-Russian bilge that they would have made anyway—as long as they could find someone to pay for their microphones and cameras.

On the other hand, you might think a person at all concerned about due diligence would ask a few questions about the amount of cash being dumped on their head. An op-ed in a newspaper or a magazine usually nets the writer a few hundred bucks. Well-known podcasters and the biggest writers on Substack—and there are only a few—can make $1 million or more a year, but most people on those platforms never get near that kind of income. According to the indictment, however, the unnamed company agreed to pay one contributor $400,000 each month for hosting four weekly videos, and offered another a contract to make occasional videos at $100,000 a pop.

Now, maybe I’m not well versed in the high-flying world of Tennessee media companies, but that seems like an awful lot of cabbage.

What’s really going on here is that the Russians have identified two major weaknesses in their American adversaries. The first is that a big slice of the American public, especially since the ascent of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, has an almost limitless appetite for stories that jack up their adrenaline: They will embrace wild conspiracies and “news” meant to generate social conflict so long as the stories are exciting, validate their preexisting worldviews, and give them some escape from life’s daily doldrums.

The other is that more than a few Americans have the combination of immense greed and ego-driven grievances that make them easy targets either for recruitment or to be used as clueless dupes. The Russians, along with every other intelligence service in the world, count on finding such people and exploiting their avarice and insecurity. This is not new. (The United States does it too. Money is almost always the easiest inducement to treason.) But the widespread influence of social media has opened a new front in the intelligence battle.

Professional secret agents no longer need to find highly placed Americans who have access to secrets or who might influence policy discussions. Instead of the painstaking work that usually takes months or even years to suborn foreign citizens, the Kremlin can just dragoon a couple of its own people to pose as business sharps with money to burn, spread cash around like manure in a field full of half-wits, and see what blossoms.

The shenanigans described in the DOJ document were not exactly a SPECTRE-level op. In this case, Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva apparently developed and maintained a fake persona named “Eduard Grigoriann” who, for some reason, was just itching to plop a ton of money down on a venture in Tennessee. (Grigorian is a common name from the Caucasus region, but it is almost never transliterated with a double n at the end, which was a possible tell that it was a fake.) Even more amusing, Grigoriann apparently missed a meeting with his American partners because he was on Moscow time when he was supposed to be in Paris. According to the DOJ indictment, when Grigoriann realized he was too early for the meeting, he then performed a Google search for “time in Paris.”

Oops. Remember, junior spies, always be aware of your time zone.

As idiotic as this business was, Americans should not be complacent. Yes, people such as Johnson and Pool are execrable trolls, and yes, Chen has been fired from Blaze Media, a major conservative media outlet. But to the Russians, cooperative foreigners are interchangeable and replaceable. Meanwhile, the Kremlin is playing a very smart game here. For a relative pittance—$10 million is probably the loose change in the bottom drawer of Vladimir Putin’s desk—they gain a potentially huge amount of social discord, which in turn can translate directly into the electoral outcome the Russians so fervently desire: Trump’s return to the Oval Office.

Today, Putin even trolled America by saying—“ironically,” according to the Russian press service TASS—that he would prefer that Kamala Harris win the election. She “laughs so emphatically and infectiously,” he said, that perhaps she wouldn’t impose more sanctions on Russia. That’s a lovely mixture of condescension and sexism, of course. Putin added that Trump had been very hard on Russia and imposed more sanctions than any other president; this is false, but it allowed Putin to affirm an oft-deployed Trump lie.

The Justice Department finally seems to be going on the offense and fighting back against these Russian attacks on America. But this indictment is probably only the tip of the iceberg: Unfortunately, the Russians have scads of money, and plenty of Americans are despicable enough to take their cash.

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