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Why You Shouldn’t Fret Much Over Russian Election Interference

Published

3 months ago

9 minute read

From The Rattler

By J.D. Tuccille

Governments are always screwing with other countries politics. It’s often ineffective.

If you missed the news, Russians are interfering in American politics again. If you missed history, Russians are always interfering in other countries’ politics—and so is everybody else, including the U.S. Screwing around with foreign elections is a popular sport for the world’s regimes, though it’s not clear that websites, bogus social media accounts, and funds funneled to a political-commentary network will return more bang for Putin’s rubles than did past social media shenanigans.

Russia, Again

“The Justice Department today announced the ongoing seizure of 32 internet domains used in Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns colloquially referred to as ‘Doppelganger,’ in violation of U.S. money laundering and criminal trademark laws,” according to a September 4 government press release. “In conjunction with the domain seizures, the U.S. Treasury Department announced the designation of 10 individuals and two entities as part of a coordinated response to Russia’s malign influence efforts targeting the 2024 U.S. presidential election.”

The indictment specified “the defendants, have deployed nearly $10 million, laundered through a network of foreign shell entities, to covertly fund and direct U.S. Company-I [which] publishes English-language videos on multiple social media channels, including TikTok, Instagram, X, and YouTube.”

“Many of the videos published by U.S. Company-I contain commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics related to domestic and foreign policy,” adds the indictment. “While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine.”

Based on details in the indictment, Company-1 has been identified as Tenet Media (since shuttered), which managed a stable of right-wing pundits including Lauren Southern, Tim Pool, Taylor Hansen, Matt Christiansen, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson. The company promoted, the indictment says, “nearly 2,000 videos that have garnered more than 16 million views on YouTube alone.”

Very nefarious, right? Well, maybe not. While Tenet founder Lauren Chen has gone quiet and lost her gig with Blaze TV and channels on YouTube, Tenet’s contributors seem baffled by the whole thing.

“The Culture War Podcast was licensed by Tenet Media, it existed well before any license agreement with Tenet and it will continue to exist after any such agreement expires,” insists Tim Pool. “Never at any point did anyone other than I have full editorial control of the show.”

Benny Johnson also says, “I am the only person who ever had editorial control of my program.”

Translated Russian documents outlining a “guerilla media campaign in the United States” caution their intended audience that “in the United States there are no pro-Russian and/or pro-Putin mainstream politicians or sufficiently large numbers of influencers and voters. There is no point of justifying Russia and no one to justify it to.” The campaign was meant to exploit “the high level of polarization of American society” by paying commentators to say things they were already saying.

It’s not clear they got a lot of mileage from that program.

Not a Lot of Bang for the Ruble

“Numbers like those might sound impressive,” independent journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote of the Tenet pundits drawing 16 million YouTube views after receiving $10 million. “But my Twitter analytics informs me that over the past year, my posts garnered 463 million views. So Russia’s dastardly scheme reached a small fraction of the people my dumbass posts do.”

That’s typical for foreign meddling in our already messy domestic politics.

“It would appear unlikely that the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter could have had much more than a relatively minor influence on individual-level attitudes and voting behavior,” concluded a 2023 analysis of Russian interference in the 2016 election published in the journal Nature Communications. The authors added, “we did not detect any meaningful relationships between exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts and changes in respondents’ attitudes on the issues, political polarization, or voting behavior.”

In 2020, foreign influencers worked against each other, including supposed allies in the latest Axis of Evil. A 2021 report from the government’s National Intelligence Council, which reports to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), found “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party” while “Iran carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects.” Also meddling were forces including “Lebanese Hizballah, Cuba, and Venezuela.”

This sort of sounds like a cost-effective means of funding U.S. elections—just let foreign intelligence operations pay for them. But the ODNI report cautioned these schemes “undermine public confidence in the electoral process and US institutions, and sow division and exacerbate societal tensions in the US.” Which means getting us upset and pointing fingers about foreign interference is a goal of these schemes.

The same can almost certainly be said when U.S. agencies join the fun.

Election Interference Is a Game the U.S. Also Plays

“I was alarmed in 2016 by how policymakers and commentators frequently described Russian interference in our election as unprecedented,” according to the Wilson Center’s David Shimer, who wrote Rigged (2020) on the topic. “Many former CIA officers told me in interviews that they viewed the ’48 operation in Italy as the agency at its best. And in the aftermath of that operation, as the CIA’s chief internal historian put it to me, the agency and the KGB went toe to toe in elections all over the world.”

The National Endowment for Democracy, founded by Congress in 1983, is “dedicated to fostering the growth of a wide range of democratic institutions abroad, including political parties, trade unions, free markets and business organizations.” It does so through “grants to support the projects of non-governmental groups abroad.” I find the NED and its goals less troublesome than those of Russians funding U.S. political pundits, but I bet lots of people elsewhere disagree. Fundamentally, it’s all part of the same international contest to screw with the internal debates of allies and adversaries alike.

So, take reports of Russian interference in American elections with a grain of salt, knowing that Putin is paying Americans to say what they already believe, and the U.S. does the same in other countries. Importantly, none of that interference prevents you from making your own decisions.
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Former FBI Asst Director Warns Terrorists Are ‘Well Embedded’ In US, Says Alert Should Be ‘Higher’

Published on December 22, 2024

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Chris Swecker on “Anderson Cooper 360” discussing terror threat

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

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Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker warned Friday on CNN that terrorists are “well embedded” within the United States, stating the threat level should be “higher” following an attack in Germany.

A 50-year-old Saudi doctor allegedly drove his car into a crowded Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany on Friday leaving at least two people dead and nearly 70 injured so far. On “Anderson Cooper 360,” Swecker was asked if he believes there is a potential “threat” to the U.S. as concerns have risen since the “fall of Afghanistan.” 

“I think so,” Swecker said. “I mean, we’ve heard FBI Director Chris Wray talk about this in conjunction with the relative ease of getting across the southern border. And, you know, there’s no question that terrorists have come across that border, whether they’re lone terrorists or terrorist cells. And they’re well embedded inside this country.”

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“I’ve worked terrorist cases. Hezbollah has always had a presence here. They raise funds here, and they can always be called into action as an active terrorist cell,” Swecker added. “So I think the alert here, especially around Christmas time, is elevated. It probably ought to be higher than what it is right now, because I mentioned that complacency earlier. And I fear that complacency as someone who has a background in this field.”

Concerns over the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the U.S. southern border have raised questions over the vetting process of illegal immigrants entering the country.

On Tuesday United States Border Patrol (USPB) Chief Jason Owens announced in a social post that an unidentified South African national who was “suspected of terror”  was arrested in Brooklyn, N.Y. The illegal immigrant had originally been detained in Texas for criminal trespassing but was released due to the “information available at the time.”

In August an estimated 99 individuals on the U.S. terrorist watch list had been released into the country after crossing through the southern border, according to a congressional report. The report found that between fiscal years 2021 and 2023 USBP agents encountered more than 250 illegal migrants on the terrorist watchlist, with nearly 100 of those individuals being later released into the U.S. by the Department of Homeland Security.

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LNG Farce Sums Up Four Years Of Ridiculous Biden Energy Policy

Published on December 21, 2024

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

That is what happens when “science” isn’t science at all and energy reality is ignored in favor of the prevailing narratives of the political left.

As Congress struggled with yet another chaotic episode of negotiations over another catastrophic continuing resolution, all I could think was how wonderful it would be for everyone if they just shut the government down and brought an end to the Biden administration and its incredibly braindead and destructive energy-policy farce a month early.

What a blessing it would be for the country if President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were forced to stop “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” 30 days ahead of schedule. What a merry Christmas we could have if we never had to hear silly talking points based on pseudoscience from the likes of Biden’s climate policy adviser John Podesta or Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm or Biden himself (read, as always, from his ever-present TelePrompTer) again!

What a shame it has been that the rest of us have been forced to take such unserious people seriously for the last four years solely because they had assumed power over the rest of us. As Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead spent decades singing: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

Speaking of Granholm, she put the perfect coda to this administration’s seemingly endless series of policy scams this week by playing cynical political games with what was advertised as a serious study. It was ostensibly a study so vitally important that it mandated the suspension of permitting for one of the country’s great growth industries while we breathlessly awaited its publication for most of a year.

That, of course, was the Department of Energy’s (DOE) study related to the economic and environmental impacts of continued growth of the U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) export industry. We were told in January by both Granholm and Biden that the need to conduct this study was so urgent, that it was entirely necessary to suspend permitting for new LNG export infrastructure until it was completed.

The grand plan was transparent: implement the “pause” based on a highly suspect LNG emissions draft study by researchers at Cornell University, and then publish an impactful DOE study that could be used by a President Kamala Harris to implement a permanent ban on new export facilities. It no doubt seemed foolproof at the Biden White House, but schemes like this never turn out to be anywhere near that.

First, the scientific basis for implementing the pause to begin with fell apart when the authors of the draft Cornell study were forced to radically lower their emissions estimates in the final product published in September.

And then, the DOE study findings turned out to be a mixed bag proving no real danger in allowing the industry to resume its growth path.

Faced with a completed study whose findings essentially amount to a big bag of nothing, Granholm decided she could not simply publish it and let it stand on its own merits. Instead, someone at DOE decided it would be a great idea to leak a three-page letter to the New York Times 24 hours before publication of the study in an obvious attempt to punch up the findings.

The problem with Granholm’s letter was, as the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board put it Thursday, “the study’s facts are at war with her conclusions.” After ticking off a list of ways in which Granholm’s letter exaggerates and misleads about the study’s actual findings, the Journal’s editorial added, “Our sources say the Biden National Security Council and career officials at Energy’s National Laboratories disagree with Ms. Granholm’s conclusions.”

There can be little doubt that this reality would have held little sway in a Kamala Harris presidency. Granholm’s and Podesta’s talking points would have almost certainly resulted in making the permitting “pause” a permanent feature of U.S. energy policy. That is what happens when “science” isn’t science at all and energy reality is ignored in favor of the prevailing narratives of the political left.

What a blessing it would have been to put an end to this form of policy madness a month ahead of time. January 20 surely cannot come soon enough.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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