The Kremlin is turning to unwitting Americans and commercial public relations firms in Russia to spread disinformation about the U.S. presidential race, top intelligence officials said Monday, detailing the latest efforts by America’s adversaries to shape public opinion ahead of the 2024 election.
The warning comes after a tumultuous few weeks in U.S. politics that have forced Russia, Iran and China to revise some of the details of their propaganda playbook. What hasn’t changed, intelligence officials said, is the determination of these nations to seed the internet with false and incendiary claims about American democracy to undermine faith in the election.
“The American public should know that content that they read online — especially on social media — could be foreign propaganda, even if it appears to be coming from fellow Americans or originating in the United States,” said an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under rules set by the office of the director.
Russia continues to pose the greatest threat when it comes to election disinformation, authorities said, while there are indications that Iran is expanding its efforts and China is proceeding cautiously when it comes to 2024.
We have people with accumulated priors who were trained to reflexively respond to certain stimuli after decades of social programming.
You can’t “critical thinking” your way past a phobia or a fixation. That’s not how the human mind works. And Americans have had these neuroses embedded in their psyches for generations, thanks to a systematic effort by corporate interests to divide and conquer the domestic labor force.
The weird right is cracking up. It no longer has a firm liberal basis for reactionary beliefs or a large evangelical base with a uniform understanding of religious obligations and taboos. What education they’re doing is fractured, confused, and contradictory. And a big part of that fracturing is coming from their dissolution of public education, public media, and post-educational institutions.
40 years ago, people talked about the Food Pyramid and the D.A.R.E. program like they were gospels. You didn’t need to hang the 10 Commandments in everyone’s classrooms, because we already knew them all by heart. Now you can’t convince half the country to get a flu shot, because the paranoia and conspiracy has gotten so out of hand. Everyone’s a weird fringe branch of a Protestant off-shot of a rapidly deteriorating central church. No “common core” seems to exist anymore. Education is just taking a thousand confusingly written word problem exams while we find new ways to replace teachers with teleprompters.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer. The center cannot hold. Slouching towards Bethlehem, etc. Either Americans find a way back to their Reagan-Era Traditional nationalist identity, they find a new center to rally around, or this thing we call a United States is going to crack like an egg.