A Long Screwdriver: How Russia Exploits US Grievances
Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports on how Putin's regime works to divide Americans
“Unconstrained by facts or journalistic standards—striving to kill two birds with one stone—Russian propagandists are now blaming both the Democrats and Ukrainians for an attempt on Trump’s life, and hoping it will ignite a civil war in the United States.”
—Julia Davis, on X/Twitter, 14 July 2024
“Russia Gloats Over Shooting: ‘Trump Has Biden’s Balls in his Hand’”, reads Julia Davis’ headline in the Daily Beast. Davis, who documents Russian propaganda for an American audience, detailed the response on a popular Russia state TV program, where a former New York Times reporter “baselessly claimed” the Democratic party was behind Trump’s attempted assassination, while also claiming “Ukrainian special services may be behind this—on orders from the White House.”
It is, of course, nonsense, but that is the point.
The point is to pollute and confuse reality, so chaos ensues, making a shared narrative of truth elusive. This narrative pollution has roots in the Soviet era — the KGB planted lies about the Kennedy assassination through propagandists posing as journalists and the lies became part of American lore.
As Adam Sybera — a reporter documenting war crimes in Ukraine — told Byline Supplement, “Once a lie enters the discussion discourse, it is there and lives its own life, inevitably someone will pay attention to it.”
So regurgitating lies has no downside for the propagandists, but it can be extremely damning to democracies, which rely on that shared narrative of truth to function.
Whether it’s clarity on the science of vaccines, a brouhaha over Joe Biden’s age, Hillary Clinton and her emails, or the latest — an attempted assassination of Donald Trump and Biden’s dropping out — the orcs are dispatched to exploit America.
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