UNITING PROPAGANDA MACHINES .........

  

Putin’s Propaganda Machine Is What America’s Right Wants

“National security leaders“ must fight it at home

Kevin Baron

March 11, 2022

Take a good look at the propaganda machine. The total control of information and messages from the airwaves to the internet, the fawning over the infallible leader—it’s all quite impressive.I’m not talking about Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. I’m talking about America’s right-wing media, on display at two conferences in Orlando last week, and every night on cable TV. 

It’s hard to watch Russia's version of journalism and not think of the American right-wing version of it. Indeed, the connections are both direct and philosophical—and of import to national security leaders. But there’s a deeper connection as well. America’s right-wing partisans wish they had what Putin has: control of the information and messages that flow to the body politic. That’s not an accusation; it is their goal. 

In the past few months, we’ve seen just how closely related the two are, Putin’s propaganda and our own. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, America’s right-wing denied the looming threat as a wag-the-dog conspiracy concocted by deep-state Democrats and centrist Republicans, or tried to blame Joe Biden. Russian propaganda outlets gleefully put those clips into heavy rotation. 

Two weeks into the invasion, far-right leaders continue to sow doubt on war reporting, claiming or implying there is an elite conspiracy to keep Americans uninformed, and often parroting Russian propagandists’ distortions and lies. “We have to question everything we’re told,” said a recent chryon on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show. Steve Bannon, who ran Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, declared on his own show that Americans should not support U.S. aid for Ukraine “until we get a full briefing of what is going on, with facts.”

So, while commentators and security legends by now have called the Ukraine war a wake-up call to Americans for many reasons, allow me to add one more: If you look upon Russia’s loyalist media with horror, then it’s time to wake up with equal concern toward America’s own rising partisan propaganda machines. There have already been calls for security professionals to add America’s right-wing extremism to their portfolios. It’s time to do the same for domestic right propaganda. 

Even Bad Propaganda Can Work

These Russian media messages are resonating with the American right-wing, whose media personalities are happily carrying Moscow’s water. On Wednesday, for example, former Trump campaign spokeswoman A.J. Delgado, said the news that Russian bombs have targeted civilians was “probably bullshit.”The American right, is trying to undermine public trust in institutions and sources that challenge their power, so it has turned its sights on the world’s journalists.The American right-wing also has tried to put a leash on social media platforms.

A disheartening number of Russians are cheering on Putin’s war. The painted letter “Z” symbol on Russia’s military hardware in Ukraine has fast become a nationalist virtue signal. Others compare the “Z” to the Nazi swastika, but to us it has echoes of the “Punisher” logo that has become a totem of right-wing militia who thought they’d overthrow the U.S. government with the Jan. 6 insurrection. 

To be sure, plenty of Americans are confused already. On Monday, Tucker Carlson used a clip of a mixed-martial-arts fighter to deliver a dose of his contention that Republicans who support Biden’s decision to help Ukraine fight off Putin’s invasion are guilty of “lunacy.”

“You know, here’s my first thought: I’m not going nowhere to fight none of these wars for these politicians,” Bryce Mitchell says in the clip. “I’m staying at home and when the war comes to Arkansas, I will dig my boots into the ground and I will die for everything I love and I will not retreat.” He added, “I don’t know what’s going on, to be honest, brother. I really don’t. There’s been so much stuff, and I don’t think anyone knows…” before drifting off into a tirade about Hunter Biden, tax dollars to “bribe” Ukraine, and homeless veterans.

The Fox host put words into the fighter’s mouth to say that Mitchell’s folksy opposition to Biden’s intervention in Ukraine is correct because the U.S. military is supposed to “defend” only America. “That’s why we call it the Defense Department. It is not called the Department of Nation-Building or the Bureau of Trans-Evangelism,” Carlson said, throwing in another far-right culture war non sequitur.

Carlson is the right’s most popular messenger, watched by an average of 15 million American each night, which is sometimes twenty times as many as, say CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Tucker Carlson is the only person on TV talking any sense about Russia / Ukraine. Our leaders ignore him at their (and our) peril,” tweeted one rightist pundit who used to work for Carlson’s Daily Caller.

Yet national security elites seem determined to do so. Search some of the top U.S. think tanks websites: Carlson is mentioned just seven times by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, nowhere by the Center for a New American Security, but 85 times by the conservative American Enterprise Institute. At the Council on Foreign Relations’s website, he is mentioned 42 times—but only eight since 2020. It’s almost as if some never learned their lesson from 2015, when the "national security establishment" hoped they could make Trump go away by ignoring him.

Or when everyone ignored the right’s openly-stated plans for the Jan. 6 insurrection, perhaps the most troubling national security incident on American soil since the 9/11 attacks. That day was made possible by 40 years’ worth of right-wing, anti-government propaganda.

State media watch

How can Putin think he can get away with blatant propaganda, in today’s world? It wasn’t long ago that Trump thought he could. By installing loyalists to run Voice of America and its sister overseas news services, Trump briefly turned the United States’ information organizations into his own personal PR shop. One Trump-era broadcast into Cuba called George Soros “a nonbelieving Jew of flexible morals.” 

Fearing that Trump would order these organizations to target Americans with propaganda, security experts at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice urged lawmakers to act. Congress failed to do so. The only thing that stopped Trump was losing re-election. If he hadn’t, would VOA and Radio Free Europe now be partnered up with Putin’s TASS? 

The First Amendment limits what the U.S. government can do to the free press. U.S. troops are not going to invade 30 Rockefeller Center and take over NBC News. But they don’t have to as long as the rightist propaganda machine is able to chip away at trust in American journalism—and as long as Americans fall for it, and elect politicians who love to do it.

When rightist freshman congressman and media darling Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina won his seat in November, he boasted that he was focused on rhetorical bomb-throwing, not governing: “I have built my staff around comms rather than legislation.” Cawthorn was elected while trumpeting false claims about election fraud, predicting “bloodshed”  and envisioning “having to pick up arms against a fellow American.” Last weekend, he was caught on tape calling Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “thug” whose government “has been pushing woke ideologies.” 

Real fake news

While politicians come and go, the lasting damage is in the lingering popularity of Soviet-style agitprop propaganda from loyalist right-wing media operations. These outlets are de facto paid actors, directors, and scriptwriters of a carefully crafted fiction that would make the Kremlin proud. They are reporters that operate in pretend newsrooms like Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, Carlson’s Daily Caller, Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal, and upstarts like One America News Network and Newsmax. They are different from older conservative magazines like the National Review and Weekly Standard, whose writers did not try to impersonate straight newsrooms. 

The new wave of rightist newsrooms is so blatantly troubling that some have questioned whether it crosses legal boundaries for broadcast news. In December, however, Gigi Sohn, Biden’s controversial nominee to head the FCC, promised Congress she would not heed liberal calls to revoke the broadcast licenses of conservative outlets, even though she advocated considering it as a private citizen and has called Fox “state-sponsored propaganda.” FCC rules say it is “illegal for broadcasters to intentionally distort the news.” Newsmax and OANN backed Sohn, who awaits confirmation. (It’s not a new idea. In 2017, Trump suggested  the FCC revoke the broadcast license of NBC News over a news segment he disliked. The FCC commissioner at the time said he did not have that authority.) 

Fox, the cable TV network may have smelled an opportunity to throw caution to the wind. The nation’s most popular network fell off with Trump loyalists but has won many back by shifting even further to the right. Out went several of Fox’s true journalists, notably Chris Wallace, who had seen enough. In came more firebrands and personality hosts, like Jesse Watters. This is how extreme Fox’s rightward shift is. 

Right-wing media is clear about where it’s heading. Two weeks ago, Fox and several of its competitors set up shop on the Orlando expo floor of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. Why should national security leaders care? Because they influence Americans. As CPAC leader Matt Schlapp said, “There is no other conference like this in the world. We’re the largest annual conservative conference in the world on politics, and now we do two in this country, and we’re doing them overseas.” 

It was the weekend before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. At CPAC, where Trump once hugged the American flag—keynote speakers hammered Biden’s foreign policy as “weak,” many declining to criticize Russia or Putin. Across town, at the even-farther-right’s America First conference, they chanted, “Putin! Putin!” A subsequent poll found Trump voters had a better opinion of Putin than Biden.

What is to be doneThe tricky question is, in a society built on free speech, what can be done?

The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act forbids the U.S. government to use propaganda on Americans at home. But it shouldn’t have to. The answer to bad speech is, as ever, more speech—but focused speech. Defense and national security leaders can use time-tested methods to marginalize extremist messaging. Five years ago, two legal scholars drew upon Cold War lessons to lay out three steps for fighting Russian disinformation: First, the national security community must respond to partisan propaganda with a collective, and preferably nonpartisan voice. Second, it must organize its leading voices to flood the zone with messages that marginalize disinformation. Finally, credible leaders must actively respond to propaganda, countering the lies and calling out those who spew them. These sure sound like they could help at home.

The good news is, this thinking already exists in the U.S. government. The recommendations paraphrased above were written by co-authors Ashley Deeks, a University of Virginia law professor now serving as a White House associate counsel and deputy legal counsel on Biden’s National Security Council, and Sabrina McCubbin, a UVA student who is now a lawyer at the Pentagon. And that’s just one idea. 

 A longer than usual article, depicting a very true and factual situation here in America and the world, intensifying and making full use of the propaganda machines through fake news and very biased systematic brain washing of millions upon millions who show some willingness to listen and be convinced. My many thanks for following .