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A Book Update and Reflections on Russian Information Warfare
I promised in early September that I would return regularly to post updates on the book to which many of you contributed. I have, again, been lax about doing this. It is troubling my conscience. I am sure some of you are wondering why, and I’m sure some of you have guessed exactly why.
The reason is exactly what some of you must suspect. I am in such profound disagreement with so many of you about the Trump presidency — and particularly about the significance of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — that I’ve come to feel deeply alienated from you.
A yawning and bitter chasm now separates Americans. As thousands of journalists and pundits have by now remarked, we seem to inhabit two epistemic universes. We do not agree on facts, let alone our interpretation of those facts.
I am in the camp that many here now view as the enemy camp. I believe not only that Donald Trump is inherently unfit to be president, but that it is highly likely that he wittingly and illegally colluded with Russia’s efforts to swing the election in his favor, that these efforts probably did swing the election, and that this is preventing him from now acting in the American interest in critical ways.
I believe that Russia has attacked our country with the intention of destroying it. I believe we, and the world, are in great peril because of this.
This is a view significantly at odds with the majority view on Ricochet.
I don’t want to rehearse, here, all the reasons I believe this. The point of this post is to explain, first, why I’ve been reluctant to post or join discussions recently. It’s also to give you an update on the book, where I do offer the reasons for these beliefs, in detail. I explicitly connect Americans’ recent political experiences to those of other countries that have come, in the past decade, to be similarly divided.
But my arguments aren’t suitable for a post on Ricochet. They really do take a book to make. I’m reassured by this, because as you’ll recall, I was at first unsure that what I had on my hands was really a book. My first draft too much resembled a series of Ricochet posts, strung together. Now, I can say that the manuscript is coherent. It advances a thesis about what, precisely, is happening to established liberal democracies in the 21st century, and why it is happening. There is a chapter devoted to Russia’s role in this. I do not argue that Russia’s role is the whole explanation. But I do argue it is a significant part of the explanation.
These aren’t arguments I can reduce to the length of a Tweet or a blog post, but they are arguments I desperately want you to hear and understand. On many occasions in the past few weeks, I’ve wanted to just hit “publish” on the manuscript and have it all out there. I’ve thought, “That’s enough, this book is done, people need to read this now.” I’ve been emotional. I’ve been frustrated that our national debate seems to be missing so much evidence from events overseas, evidence that is so significant. I’ve wanted to make my arguments, at last, instead of saying, “Wait for the book.”
But I haven’t done it. I know that my arguments, even if by now they’re in pretty good shape, won’t instantly transform this debate. That’s a narcissistic fantasy. If I write this book very well, and very carefully, there is a chance it may slightly inform or shape public opinion. It may help a few people better to view our domestic problems in their international context. It might offer a few people a way of looking at our situation that’s helpful to them.
But I do not think this manuscript would have even that impact if I press “publish” now. It would be too easy to attack and dismiss, because it’s still too sloppy. It is repetitive in parts, unclear in others, emotional in places where it should be cool in tone, and in some places cool in tone — boring, that is — where it absolutely can’t afford to be. I’ve not yet subjected all of my sources to sufficient scrutiny. Nor have I been rigorous enough in my fact-checking. I’ve written too much in haste, and too much in anger. It is so easy to dismiss someone’s arguments if they make careless errors — to say, “See, what does she know about this?” — and I don’t want that to happen to my book.
So that’s what’s going on. The book is going very well. I have a clear thesis. I am on schedule. I know what I wish the book to accomplish.
And I fear you will hate it. And I feel very, very conflicted and bad about this, so much so that I haven’t been around much.
But here is the other thing. I believe — and argue, in this book — that the extent to which we have been divided into two warring camps with irreconcilable views is, in part, the product of Russian information warfare. Not in whole — it only works because the divisions are real to begin with. But that is its aim. Russia’s doctrines are widely known. This is just how they’ve done it elsewhere. This is a textbook case.
I agree with Clint Watts in his recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Please read the whole thing, but he concludes with these words:
It’s been more than a year since my colleagues and I described in writing how the Russian disinformation system attacked our American democracy. We’ve all learned considerably more since then about the Kremlin’s campaigns, witnessed their move to France and Germany and now watch as the world’s worst regimes duplicate their methods. Yet our country remains stalled in observation, halted by deliberation and with each day more divided by manipulative forces coming from afar. The U.S. government, social media companies, and democracies around the world don’t have any more time to wait. In conclusion, civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words. America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.
I believe this happened; I believe we are in danger because of it. Most of you don’t. That’s a big divide.
But for years, I happily thought of the members of Ricochet as my friends. I really enjoyed our daily conversations. I agreed with many of you about most things, and when I didn’t agree, felt that we could discuss our disagreements like adults. I felt, warmly, that you were my people — Americans (mostly) with common sense, people who looked at the world basically the way I did.
Now I feel otherwise. Now I feel deeply estranged from most of the American Right.
Now, oddly, this is almost exactly the feeling I had about the American Left in the wake of September 11. The Left seemed determined to deny the significance of what had happened, to argue that this was the natural consequence of our foreign policy, that we’d just got what was coming to us for meddling in places we had no business. A large part of America seemed to me unwilling to confront reality: Whether or not we “had it coming,” we sure had an enemy that meant to destroy us. We had to decide whether we would let that happen.
What do I conclude from this? Well, first, that I go berserk when my country’s attacked. I go stark-raving berserk. I have a history under such circumstances of becoming deeply alienated from other people in my country who react differently, who take such things more in stride–who believe, perhaps, that such things happen inevitably to powerful countries, and perhaps even that we do have them coming, from time to time–that this is the price of being a superpower. I have a history of becoming alienated from people who insist that it isn’t so easy to destroy the United States, so perhaps we ought not overreact, to the point of mocking and even demonizing those people in print, to the point of seeing them as enemies within.
But in retrospect, some of the people who said, “We ought not overreact” to 9/11 seem to me to have been right–they were not quite the moral cretins or the quislings I imagined them to be at the time. Some of the people who said, “The whole point of this is to provoke us into overreaction” were, in fact, right. I was wrong to think that everyone who said such things was blithely indifferent to the magnitude of the atrocity or incapable of grasping what it said about the nature and determination of our enemy. Some of them surely were indifferent or uncomprehending. But some of them were simply more strategic, more sensible, and wiser than I was.
What does this mean, in turn? It means that I should entertain the idea that people who disagree with me about the seriousness of this event might not be crazy. Perhaps I am–for the second time–overreacting. I don’t think I am, but I’ve done it once, so I might be.
There’s another parallel. All those cliches to the effect that “You can’t let yourself be terrorized because if you do, the terrorists win,” are grounded in the reality that yes, that is indeed exactly the point of terrorism. If you give in to it, you assist terrorists in their goals and you create incentives for them to do it again. Likewise, if I and people like me allow ourselves to be divided from our friends by Russian information warfare, Russia wins — and so does every other hostile actor in the world who sees how easy it is to divide us, and how much bang you can get for your information-warfare buck.
No, our disagreements in America are not only about Russia. But they are enough about Russia that my obstinacy kicks in: I refuse to react exactly the way the Kremlin want me to. I want to stay friends with my friends. The better angels of my nature tell me clearly that no, we are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
Right now, I disagree with most of you, profoundly, about the most significant political issues of our era. That is awkward. That is not how I expected things to be, at all. But it’s reality.
So I will continue to make my case against many of your ideas–although I’ll do it in a book, not here–but I will not make a case against you. I do not and will not accept the idea that Americans who don’t agree with me are deplorable. I will not allow Russia — or Trump — to turn you, my friends, into my enemies.
I’ve been too fond of too many of you for too long for that to make any sense.
Published in General
I believe Donald Trump possesses the worst personality traits one can have as President. As to whether he is unfit to perform the duties of President, it’s of little value to so emphatically express your misgivings one year after the man was elected President, because the reality of the situation is, since Trump IS in fact President history will decide whether Trump was a fit President.
I believe there is no doubt Russia attempted to interfere with, and will continue to interfere with, democratic elections. More for the purpose of creating political vandalism and thus societal discord, than for the purpose swaying an election to one candidate or the other. Because I’m not convinced any cyber/public relations games deployed by any outside entities can sway an election given the massive resources deployed by the actual political parties/candidates running for office.
I am entirely open to the notion that Trump or a Trump agent may have communicated in some way with Russian agents to do something to gain an advantage during both the Primary and/or General election. However, what many don’t consider is that “collusion” is not a crime. Whatever “collusion” may be discovered could be considered highly improper and/or unethical and could be very politically damaging, but unless the “collusion” discovered can be defined as “treason, bribery, high crimes or misdemeanors” … (to where there is enough evidence to impeach and convict Trump of such) , then your great unraveling of any “collusion” will probably only lead to nothing but more massive Beltway/Coastal/ MSM hyperventilation by those already so disposed to anything Trump related. Because in this scenario, short of an actual impeachment conviction, the chances of Trump stepping down from office are nil.
I had hoped in this post the writer was going to provide a bullet point list of alleged Trump “collusion” examples so the reader could fairly assess whether these examples of “collusion” were plausible, could implicate Trump himself, and reached the Presidential impeachment criteria. Unfortunately we were not so enlightened and I can’t help but feel as if I were head faked into reading an overly long book promo ….. good luck with the book.
Right? Isn’t there some sort of CoC rule against such things? I mean I understand that Snowball and Napoleon, I mean the Powers that Be–haha sometimes I just forget myself–who write the CoC can be hardpressed to apply it to contributors, but, when Congressional Democrats* tell us there is no proof of collusion between Russia and Trump and yet a contributor comes right out and says “yes there was and I don’t have to prove it,” then maybe some, how shall we say, editorial guidance might be in order.
*Both DiFi and the House Intell Committee Democrat have stated on television numerous times that there is no evidence.
Please don’t let this devolve into the usual meta-discussion about ‘what Ricochet means’ and ‘what ought to be allowed’. We’ve had enough of that for the week, haven’t we?
Inhabiting two different epistemic universes is not necessarily an alienating divide. As you know from prior conversations here on Ricochet, people can be deeply divided regarding questions like, does psi exist? is evolution a satisfactory theory? does God exist? what is the true nature of mental illness? and so on. Even when it comes to Sowell’s classic divide between constrained and unconstrained visions, not all on the right are one way and not all on the left are the other.
Moreover, not just differing opinions, but differing skills, creates differences in what we know about the world, and what we feel confident we can say we know about it. People habituated to manipulating things tend to differ from people habituated to persuading people on what counts as convincing knowledge.
And yet very often, we manage to rub along together more or less. There’s more going on here than just epistemic divides. Some other context influences which epistemic divides count as important (or at least important for now) and which don’t. Is it which epistemic divides ought to count as tribal markers? Maybe.
Anyhow, it’s interesting to see how people whose worldviews are quite similar might be driven apart, and people whose worldviews are quite different, might be driven together, by a single vote, or by taking a (domestic) side on a foreign country’s clandestine interference. For me, neither is a shibboleth.
I’m fairly content knowing that I don’t know enough about clandestine operations to make much of which Americans ought to get the blame for making Russian interference easier. For others, though, taking a side may be less about what they know they can know, and more about loyalty: in a way, the less knowledge you have, the more loyalty you can demonstrate by picking a side, because you’re showing your willingness to stick to “your side” despite a higher risk of being wrong.
Had the Republicans run anybody other than Trump, Hillary would be president.
I thought the better side of Ricochet was that anyone could have a civil disagreement about anything and offer differences of opinion in the context of free speech – it’s what makes our country different from Russia and others. I also thought that Claire, as a journalist, wrote about many interesting things – that while personal opinion plays into much writing, having an objective balance that engages the reader and contributes to quality journalism, makes our country’s freedom of the press something to be held dear.
Claire, your bitterness is not felt here – it’s within you, a root has taken hold. That bitterness is all over the place in social media, and MSM, but not here. You are missing out on great discussions, posts, some about politics, some not, and the opportunity to present your work that many want to read. There are other writers that others don’t agree with – I would love to read about what you have found about Russia lately. And about other things, Turkey, your Trump assessments to date, Paris, your cats, family, your book chapter titles – good grief – you are the one pushing us away – not the other way around. That may be something for you to solve.
I read this article with a sinking feeling in my stomach, knowing that so much of the response would be pre-judged and unreasonable to say the least. Claire, just promise that you won’t allow them to convince you that you’re the one who’s crazy. You’re the last sane person in the room. That’s what we mean by two epistemic universes, right? The feeling that so many of your friends have been body-snatched and replaced with strangers, that you start to wonder if you’re the one who’s possessed. It can be hard to keep your sense of reality at times like this. If it weren’t for one side’s sudden affection for KGB goons (Sometimes you don’t know who’s been inhaling the mind-altering space gas until Spock starts laying out the case for peaceful cooperation with the Romulan Empire), it might be legitimately impossible. Also, maybe don’t come back to the US. There’s something in the air here. I’d hate to see you tweeting anti-NAFTA garbage minutes after hitting the runway.
So Hillary and the Clinton Foundation received millions of dollars from foreign governments when she was Secretary of State and during her campaign when it was a forgone conclusion she would be president, the Saudi’s bragged they had contributed 20% of her campaign
Millions from the Russians. Millions from the Saudi’s. Millions from Qatar. And on and on and on. All illegal under US law ( oh wait it’s all good because money isn’t fungible /sarc). But it’s Trump who was colluding with the Russians to disrupt an election.
You know what? I don’t care. If it kept that criminal thug and her gang of thieves out of the White House, I’m ok with it.
For anyone who hasn’t see the Russian FB ads yet, Scott Adams spent some time analyzing them yesterday. The Jesus ad is a classic.
I’d be curious if Anyone is willing to argue that those ads had any significant impact on anything.
On phone -the link below is the best I can do for SA’s periscope yesterday
https://www.pscp.tv/w/bMswEjFZTEVKTmJBdk5ERU58MWRqeFhNekxPUHpLWrW_JXZ8uCtkVOdGxqjLX7RyFK6qhbzt9YNZOzs7dIGH
Sent from my iPhone
Moderator Note:
Contributors are fellow members, too.Sad. There are no emojis so I have to just spell it out: S-A-D.
I had hoped that [redacted] was closer to a flu than the plague. You get a fever, you feel like crap for awhile, but all but the most weak recover. Now I see that it is a likely fatal condition, with only the strongest or mysteriously resistant surviving.
Claire, you get the news nearly a half day ahead of those of us on the Left Coast. And yet you cannot see how reversed things actually are from your stated point of view. Take away the personality flaws (which likely enabled Trump to avoid the information stranglehold of the MSM and its spin masters in thrall to Obama/Hillary) and you get someone in practice who is actually doing good. If you cannot see this you have diminished your reputation for insight.
The Russians are meddlers and looters, and it has been that way since the Comintern was formed, and then disbanded and became a function of the Soviet intelligence services. There have been some articles coming out of Europe that they are involved in stoking the fires of the Catalonia separatist movement, as well as a push for another referendum for Scottish independence from Britain. Two battles that I call the Have’s versus the Have-a-Lot’s.
There is no doubt in my mind that President Trump is not well read in European history, to include any real understanding of recent European history that includes WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. At best he might have the superficial understanding of the; We beat the stuffing out of the Japanese and Germans cable channel.
The American media is no better. There is nothing but silence when it comes to Venezuela, or the Russian war against the Ukrainians. Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post is the exception.
Some of the can’t we all just get along, or we can make a deal with Putin has been tamped down a bit. The retreat within our own borders would be fine if it took a foreign fleet days to appear off our shores, but those days are gone. Now another nation can reach out and touch us within minutes, or create chaos by internet hacking.
The Obama administration did some meddling of their own. The attempt to interfere with Israeli elections, and selling guns to Mexican drug cartels come to mind.
There is no doubt in my mind that the Russians interfered with both campaigns.
All I am saying is that if I wrote a piece saying that John McCain took a known fraudulent document about Trump from a foreign entity and passed it to the FBI for the sole purposes of inducing the FBI into getting a FISA warrant to intercept and analyze the content of phone conversations and then had the FBI leak said content to the press and that piece received the requisite number of likes to be considered for Main Feed, I am pretty sure the Rule Against Conspiracy would be invoked as an explanation for that not being posted to the Main Feed. Particularly, no less, if I had made such an accusation while declaring that I don’t have the time to detail the evidence that proves my case.
But, I do graciously concede that this is not the point of this OP, nor should it be the tenor of the conversation of this thread. I made my point and I shall move on.
Claire,
Perhaps it would be wise to disentangle two related but distinct elements of your argument — the issue of Russian duplicity and its consequences, on the one hand, and the specific accusation that the sitting President was deliberately involved in collusion, on the other. I suggest that for two reasons.
First, it is only the latter point, I suspect, that causes a lot of anxiety and tension. I think even most Trump supporters are willing to entertain the idea that the Russians have a substantial disinformation campaign and bad intentions as regards our electoral system and our country. That alone is an important case to make, if true, and one that needn’t be particularly threatening to beleaguered Trump supporters who feel — with some justification — that their man is too often vilified without just cause.
Secondly, and more importantly, your accusation against Trump is specific and profoundly serious, and deserves — demands — to be substantiated with unambiguous evidence. This isn’t true of the Russian argument, which by its nature involves a distant, protracted, and complex conspiracy which may show itself as patterns of behavior and effect which themselves, over time, take on the weight of evidence. A different standard of evidence can be used to support a theoretical accusation against a hostile foreign power. Accusing the current President of what amounts to treason requires evidence.
And that brings me to the most difficult part of your post: that you apparently don’t have that kind of clear and unambiguous evidence to support your very specific accusations against the President. You make this point repeatedly when you say you can’t fit your argument into a blog post: coherent evidence can be summarized, and your claim that you can’t do that suggests, to me at least, that what you believe you have as evidence of Trump’s collusion is in fact suggestive and inconclusive — inadequate, in short, to support such a serious accusation.
Finally, your acknowledgement that much of the manuscript was written in haste and anger, combined with the fact that you don’t feel able to summarize the case for your most critical accusations, makes me uneasy about the clarity of thought you’re bringing to this process.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You are asking a lot of your audience.
Respectfully,
Hank
I have a couple liberal patients that have gone full delusion and alienated all their former friends who disagree with their visions of reality. It’s like a cult. They are miserable and consumed with slanted news programs daily, experiencing little or no joy from life, typing bitterly on a tear stained keyboard.
Another note of caution. It’s possible that the extraordinary evidence, if provided, will not be believed (even if both parties are reasoning consistently).
In this group of people? I would expect the vast majority here would adjust their world view in the face of clear evidence.
I would never regret Trump’s election for one second but I’d support his impeachment if clear incontrovertible evidence of treason was presented.
Probably.
But I’m more concerned with the nature of whatever evidence Claire believes she has, and that she finds it simultaneously sufficiently compelling to justify such a serious accusation, yet insufficiently concise and unambiguous so as to be presented in a thousand words.
Even in this group of people. And not always because of cognitive bias. As I said,
You’ve got to be kidding me. Redacted?
I think this misstates the argument, it borders on bad faith to say that the people on the other side of this discussion have an affection for KGB goons. I can say without reservation that I do not like KGB goons.
I do not think that anyone, anywhere in the media has made the case that these KGB goons took any action that actually mattered in the election. They put up some fake facebook stuff and spent really minimal money on it. I am sure this moved tens of votes not millions of votes.
There has been no evidence anywhere proving Trump collusion with Russia, nor that any collusion is a legal issue rather than a political issue. That is to say any evidence of collusion is not a matter for a prosecutor as there is no law against collusion, it is a matter for the voters. They can re-elect Trump or not.
Up their Geodon and add Abilify.
Not to make them better, but for the side effects.
OK I keed I keed.
A lot to unpack here.
I’ll agree with the first point, the second is currently unproven, the third unlikely, and the last point irrelevant. So clearly we disagree. Big deal. People disagree all the time. I doubt there’s anyone in the world that agrees with me on everything. Even (especially) my wife. She thinks that The Princess Bride isn’t a good movie and that broccoli tastes delicious. She’s also a Democrat, at least according to her voter registration. But despite these (and many other) great divides, I’m closer to her than anyone else in the world. It’s not like these issues don’t come up or we just avoid everything we disagree on. I’m sure she’s annoyed that I make faces whenever she cooks broccoli and I’m annoyed because broccoli contaminates everything else in the kitchen with its awfulness. That’s life. Don’t despair because Ricochet (and indeed all of America) has great divides. We have always had and will always have those, and if you let them become the focus of everything then despair is inevitable. I’ll buy your book and read your arguments. I may love it, or hate it; most likely it’ll be somewhere in between. But either way I wouldn’t judge you solely based on my opinion of the book. All I ask is that you don’t pass judgement on us solely because we may disagree.
Gotta love a gal with tardive dyskinesia.
Two additional, small observations, perhaps tangential but on my mind lately and this seems a lively forum in which to toss them out.
I beg to differ. There is a great deal of bitterness here.
I don’t think Trump colluded with the Russians, and I find it sad that Claire is convinced so.
But objectively, there is tremendous bitterness on Ricochet towards anyone critical of Trump.
I completely agree. There was nothing on Facebook that created a situation in which I would never vote for Hillary Clinton. There was nothing in DNC emails that were either hacked or it was an inside job, that changed anything for me.
I was never ever going to vote for Hillary. That is a common theme among Trump voters I know in real life. I don’t mean to insult the author but there could be some benefit to visiting States that Trump won by large margins. Speak to Trump voters before deciding that Russia was a big deal. I think that you will find most of them, 99% even did not see the junk on Facebook. The DNC “hack” just reenforced what they already thought and did not change a vote
I used to think this. Alas, we on the right no longer want to debate.
Concur. For it to have changed the election outcome it would have had to change ~70K targeted votes in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. A disinformation process campaign that precise needs to be stolen and copied.
Think of the profits Ricochet could make if @fredcole could deploy that Deathstar.
Gaius,
Your “sudden affection for KGB goons” is again an exaggeration completely out of proportion unless you are talking about Hillary’s Russian reset button and Obama’s whispering “I’ll take care of you after the election” to Medvedev.
This brings up a deeper point. Rhetoric and sanctions are not enough to stop Putin. This is the childish Obamite delusion. Putin moved panzer divisions to the border of Ukraine and the Baltics. Obama and the EU did nothing but talk. Their total inaction was extremely dangerous. Trump’s whole attitude let Putin know he’s barking up the wrong tree no thanks to the EU that won’t even pony up their 2% GDP.
The Trump speech in Poland was worth a thousand sanctimonious gestures. It is the MSM that is bankrupt. It was their job to report on the murder of Boris Nemtsov. It was their job to report honestly about the little green men in eastern Ukraine. I’m sure Obama’s foggy bottom shut that reporting down quick. Nice trained lapdogs in the White House press core. Last report I heard not a single Republican among them. Wow, real objectivity that we can rely on.
Regards,
Jim