I tend to agree with Steve Benen and others that, while Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) can sure talk purty, when it comes to the actual voting, he’s no better than his Republican brethren, and given how the Republican Party has sped to the right in the last couple of decades[1], that’s saying something. Perhaps, though, I’m unfair, as his FiveThirtyEight-supplied Trump score as of this writing is only 87.2%.
But he is sensible enough to write up a useful op-ed column for WaPo warning about a subject already covered on this blog – deepfakes. This undetectable doctoring of pictures and videos may result in the complete collapse of the industry, or some sort of technical solution – I don’t know.
Along the way, Sasse brings up an exacerbating factor:
We are so domestically divided right now, about who we are and what we hold in common, that malevolent foreign actors can pick at dozens of scabs as they seek to weaken us. In many of the current domestic flash points — over guns and geography, race and gender, religion and institutions — the nation’s cultural, political and even economic leaders often seem more interested in fomenting discord than in rallying us around a shared battle plan.
I completely agree, but he’s put it so baldly that I thought about President Trump’s eagerness to terminate the Mueller investigation, and suddenly wondered…
Are we the victims of one of the longest-running, subtle, and grandest foreign societal influence schemes ever put together?
Sasse hints at it a little later, and probably unconsciously:
We can work hard to roll back the distrust of our opponents that makes us more susceptible to the effects of disinformation. Rising political tribalism, shamelessly exaggerating our opponents’ claims or behavior, is leaving us vulnerable: No one loves America’s internal fighting — and our increasingly siloed news consumption — more than Vladimir Putin.
Sasse doesn’t connect the dots, but I will: what if our societal uproar has actually been the result of Russian meddling? Robert Mueller’s indictment of the Internet Research Agency certainly hints at Russian aims. OK, it’s not a hint, it’s a fucking banner towed behind the Cessna passing overhead as you read this post.
It’s blatant.
But what if that’s just a small part of a scheme of ol’ Vlad to retain power and punish the United States, which is, after all, responsible for the destruction of the Soviet Union? Comrade Putin was a KGB Agent – revenge is not out of the question.
That opens up the subject of how? Influencing American society requires people with strong, undiluted messages to come to the fore, because a lot of Americans respect strong messages that lack nuance. Then those people take control of organizations to use for their planned goals. If Mueller is uncovering such schemes, then we should expect those personalities to begin drifting away, dropping out of sight, that sort of thing, as their Russian handlers get word of their schemes being investigated. On the left, that might include key influential academics who have discredited the reputation of the left through radical pronouncements and proposals. I’m not familiar enough with the left to name names, which may be fortunate for me.
On the right? Sharpening division requires the activation of System 1 thinking, and that’s certainly been a salient feature in the messages of many right wing leaders, both sectarian and secular. Voices from the National Rifle Association (NRA) certainly come to mind, as do the more extreme religious leaders, particularly those who’ve hopped up and down on the issue of abortion so many times that they no longer have ankles. This post from Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter Poza concerning a program at the Heritage Foundation is also of interest, although I always have to consider the source when it’s the The Daily Kos.
So as Mueller continues to hint at an upcoming report release, we might expect to see a few people disappear. I don’t know if disappear means turn up dead or turn up in Moscow. Just think of it as getting out of reach of the enraged.
1 Which brings to mind President Reagan’s comment on his former membership in the Democratic Party:
“I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”
Which, when you think about it, should have given the Republican Party more than a little pause.
