Putin’s
Fifth Column
August
27, 2022
I’m reading the
book Putin’s Playbook, Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America by Rebekah
Koffler.[1]
Koffler is ethnic Russian. She grew up in Soviet Kazakhstan and emigrated to
the United States as a young woman.[2]
She worked for years in American intelligence including time with the Defense
Intelligence Agency, where she worked for General Michael Flynn. Her political
views, which she expresses in the “Author’s Introduction, Why I Wrote This
Book,” are appalling. Yet her analyses of Russian President Vladimir Putin and
the Russian people are spot on. She claims that American intelligence agencies
and the whole American government don’t understand and resist understanding
Russia. Never having worked in American intelligence or any other part of the
American government, I am in no position to evaluate that claim. I write here
only to present and discuss one little snippet from the book that is both
intriguing and concerning.
Koffler discusses
at some length what she depicts as Putin’s, and more broadly Russia’s, plan to
weaken the United States through non-military acts. As part of that discussion
she writes:
Fomenting a crisis and bringing about the
collapse of the US government and democratic system are goals Putin is pursuing….According
to the unclassified 2017 intelligence assessment, in the runup to the 2012 US
presidential election, the Russian government-sponsored, English language
channel RT News helped stir up discontent by alleging election fraud, voting
machine vulnerabilities, corruption of the US ‘ruling class,’ lack of democracy
in America, ‘corporate greed,’ and other inflammatory messages. RT also
advocated that Americans ‘take back’ the government and change the US system
through a ‘revolution.’[3]
In this brief passage Koffler
attributes what she says Russia did to a particular media outlet and a
particular time frame, but she would not hesitate to ascribe the activity she
mentions to the entire Russian government and to Vladimir Putin himself over
the course of many years and right up to today.
Koffler here says
the Russians try to convince Americans of these things in order to disrupt and
weaken America:
1. Election
fraud.
2. Voting
machine vulnerabilities.
3. Corruption
of the US “ruling class.”
4. Lack
of democracy in America.
5. “Corporate
greed.”
6. The
need for Americans to “take back” their government.
7. The
need for them to do it through a revolution.
Of course, Russia spreads these
disruptive lies clandestinely and denies that they do it at all. Concealing
their hand in the spread of these things is part of their method of getting
Americans to disrupt their own government while being unaware that Russia had
anything to do with their beliefs and actions. The most striking thing about
this list of things the Russians have spread in our country sub rosa is
how closely its elements correspond to the beliefs of the MAGA, Trumpist wing
of American politics. They correspond to those beliefs as follows.
Donald Trump and
his minions have been screaming about supposed election fraud in this country
for years. Even before he was elected in 2016, Trump declared that he could
lose that election only if it were “rigged” against him. Since he lost the 2020
presidential election he has spread the big lie that he really won that
election by a landslide but that his victory was somehow stolen from him. He
continues to spread this lie to this day.
MAGA Republicans
have been yelling about nonexistent voting machine vulnerabilities for years. They
have made wild accusations against the companies that made the machines, and have
been sued for defamation because they did. Some Trumpists wanted the government
to seize voting machines in swing states that Trump lost, presumably so they
could allege to have proven that the machines were indeed vulnerable and had
indeed been hacked to create the result the anti-Trump forces wanted. It
mattered not at all to those advocating the seizure of the machines that the
federal government has no legal authority to do it.
The MAGA right’s
connection to the allegation that America’s “ruling class” is corrupt is
perhaps less obvious than are its connection to allegations of election fraud
and voting machine vulnerability, but that connection is definitely there. The
entire Trumpist, MAGA movement arises at least in part from the sense of many
ordinary Americans that the people who supposedly control the government have
worked for decades against their desires and interests. They have supposedly
instead favored Black and Brown Americans. LGBTQ+ Americans. Non-evangelical
Christian Americans (especially secular Americans). People not born or legally
residing in the United States. The supposedly liberal elites of the east and
west coasts. To the MAGA right, the supposed bias of the government and those
who control it and use it against them surely appear to be corrupt.
The MAGA right
also screams about what it sees as the lack of true democracy in this country. Trump
and his acolytes (like Rudi Giuliani) have told Trump’s base over and over
again that it is up to them to rescue the country’s democracy from those who
supposedly have taken it away from them. Trump has told them that if they don’t,
they won’t have a country anymore.
Corporate greed
is perhaps not a term Trumpists use often, but a hatred of and desire to change
it are still there in the movement. Trumpists scream all the time about how big
corporations have cost the country a vast number of jobs by moving their
manufacturing operations overseas. Those corporations have of course done it to
reduce labor costs and thereby to increase profits. The Trumpists believe, not
entirely incorrectly, that the desire of the big corporations for ever greater
profits, which one can easily call greed, has hurt them economically. They want
that situation reversed.
“Take our country
back” and “Take the government back” are phrases the MAGA right uses all the
time. The use of those phrases comes from a sense the Trumpists have that
people like them used to control the US government, that they no longer do, and
that their control of it must be restored. It doesn’t matter whether or not
this sense is supported by the facts. It only matters that a great many
Americans believe their sense of the matter, and what Trump tells them about
it, to be true.
Finally, the
Russians have worked to advance revolution as the way to restore the world the
MAGA right believes once existed, no longer exists, and must be reestablished.
At least some elements of the Trumpist movement have adopted this belief. We
see it expressed in various ways. Donald Trump courts the support of armed,
violent American terrorist groups (usually wrongly called militias) like the
Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. He says there are “fine people” among the
armed terrorists who marched through Charlottesville, Virginia chanting, “Jews
will not replace us!” Never mind that anti-Judaism is a worn out fascist
ideology that was always a lie and that hardly anyone will accept today. Trump
condemns these violent groups only reluctantly and half-heartedly. We also see
the notion of revolution as the way to correct America’s supposed wrongs in the
way Trumpist extremists speak of starting a new civil war against what they consider
to be the country’s established order.
And then there is
January 6, 2021. A mob stirred up by Donald Trump and others stormed the US
Capitol building. They broke in, forced everyone legally there to flee for
their lives, changed that the wanted to hand Vice President Pence, and attacked
and injured Capitol police officers. Through more than three hours of this
seditious riot Trump sat in the White House watching and loving his mob’s
attempt to overthrow the United States government by keeping Congress from
carrying out one of its constitutional duties. Seditious rioting and revolution
are sufficiently similar that Putin must have been delighted when he learned
what Trump’s mob had done.
I don’t know to
what extent Russian meddling in our country influenced the MAGA right to adopt
these positions and conduct these acts, but it doesn’t matter. Whether that
meddling was influential or not, the alignment of Russian disruption points and
the MAGA agenda is unmistakable. Vladimir Putin and his sycophants in the
Kremlin must be beyond delighted to see such a large segment of the American
people playing directly into their hands. The MAGA right is nothing less than
Putin’s fifth column in the United States. It’s agenda and actions are
disrupting and weakening this country in exactly the way Putin desires. And of
course, the members of the MAGA movement (except perhaps for Donald Trump himself)
are utterly unaware that they are giving Russia exactly what it wants from us.
The way the MAGA right is doing Putin’s work for him is yet another reason for
all of us to oppose it and bring an end to it as soon as possible.
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