Operation Mind Warp

How the Right’s use of Russian "political technology” carpet bombs the American Psyche

We have little time left before the election. As readers know, I have become a bit obsessed with what I can do, as a writer with a bit of an audience, to impact the situation.

For some reason, until recently I was stupidly convinced that the Trumpublicans had no chance to “win" this election. Now, I am deeply concerned he’s going to slime his way into office. I consider this a very serious threat. Clearly, Trump and Vance will lose the popular vote by a wide margin. But they could easily take the Electoral College. Also, it is clear they do not intend to concede defeat. They expect the Supreme Court to back them if necessary.

We still have a bit of time to prevent this disastrous outcome. Let’s see what we can do in the weeks ahead. I believe the vast majority of Americans do not want a White Christian nationalist dictatorship in the US that will make abortion illegal, demonize minorities and immigrants, increase wealth inequality, destroy the environment, end climate negotiations, and basically throw us into a churning cauldron of hatred and misery.

I am not deeply involved with American politics. I don’t like the two-party duopoly. As an anarchist, I find the Republicans repulsive, and the Democrats mostly awful. But based on what Trump and particularly Vance says, I realize this election is an existential crucible for America and the world. For the next few weeks, I am #harriswalz2024 all the way.

The Trumpublicans have made it clear they intend to take dictatorial control if they can. They openly admire dictators (like Pinochet, Duterte, Franco, Putin) who have ruthlessly repressed their people for many decades, imprisoning, torturing, and killing their perceived enemies and dissidents. A White Christian nationalist dictatorship in the US will have the advanced powers of Artificial Intelligence and algorithmic manipulation (Peter Thiel’s Palantir) at its disposal.

This week, I have been debating with Trump-oriented people on Facebook, with mixed results. In recent essays I have tried to understand the pathway that led so many people — including former friends and peers like Russell Brand and Charles Eisenstein — to support Trump/Vance, to my astonishment and deepening horror.

Even at this late date, I still believe in the power of reason. I believe people can be deprogrammed from false ideologies and assumptions — we could see a snowball become an avalanche in the other direction. For this to happen, people must be shown, patiently and step by step, how they got trapped in delusional beliefs. Deep down, nobody wants to be a patsy or a stooge of a malevolent Fascist regime. That won’t feel good about this error in the long term, just as many people in the UK now deeply regret their vote for Brexit.

At this point, it feels a bit like trying to talk suicidal people down from a ledge. But in many cases people finally do decide not to jump. Let’s hope this is the case in our situation.

Most Americans don’t realize they have been subject to an intensive, very skillful campaign of information warfare coming from Russia, with the support of Right Wing billionaires in the US, conducted over the last decade. Russian maestros in psychological tactics call this, “Russian political technology.”

I believe, if many confused, deceived, Trump-tending Americans realize how their worldview was cunningly manipulated using these techniques, they can snap out of the trance. Alas, the Russian attack on the American psyche gets intensified by Right Wing media, including Fox New and the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, which employs similar hypnotic and brain-dulling techniques in their repetitive broadcasts. Billions of dollars of “Dark Money” have also been used to attack Democratic candidates in local races, due to the despicable Citizens United decision.

The term “political technology” was coined by Russian political consultants and analysts during the 1990s, in the context of post-Soviet Russia. One of the key figures associated with the development of political technology in Russia is Gleb Pavlovsky, a Kremlin-connected political strategist. Pavlovsky played a central role in shaping the electoral and political tactics that would come to be described under this term.

"Political technology" refers to the systematic use of media manipulation, disinformation, phony grassroots movements, bot armies, and other deceptive tactics to shape political outcomes in ways favorable to Putin and the Kremlin. Pavlovsky and other consultants used these techniques to subvert elections, create diversionary spectacles, and manipulate public opinion. Another significant figure in this field is Vladislav Surkov, often referred to as the "gray cardinal" of the Kremlin, who further developed these tactics into a system of "managed democracy.” Surkov has said: “The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition... it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd.”

In This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev tracks Russia’s approach to information warfare since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Political technology seeks to create an ambience where there can be no shared truth or coherence: All information is weaponized. As we will see, this is what the Republicans have done, taking their communication strategy from the Kremlin’s skillful mind control tactics, with a little Goebbels (“the big lie”) thrown in. This is how they got people to lose sight of their real interests (for instance, not wanting deeper tax cuts for the wealthy and an erosion of environmental protections and social services) while becoming increasingly hypnotized and deluded.

Pomerantsev writes: “The notion of information war … replaces hypocrisy not with something better but with a world in which there are no values. In this vision all information becomes, as it is for military thinkers, merely a means to undermine an enemy, a tool to … disrupt, delay, confuse, subvert. There is no room for arguments; ideals are in and of themselves irrelevant.”

Tactics

Let’s go through the tactics that have been used in this long-term information war and psychological war conducted against the American Psyche.