Do I Look Like a Russian Propagandist?

Getting online Thursday morning, I did the usual Google vanity search. I was mystified to see a link for a hit piece by the Atlantic Council, a top DC think tank funded by the U.S. State Department, foreign governments, and other donors. And then I discovered that my article in The American Conservative, “The Democrats’ Three-Decade War on Honest Voting,” had turned me into a shameless tool of Russian propaganda.

Where did I go wrong? Were the years I spent as a Boy Scout all for naught?

Looking more closely at the article, I recognized even more rascality than I expected to find on Halloween. The article was posted by the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), a branch of the Atlantic Council that boasts that it “has operationalized the study of disinformation by exposing falsehoods and fake news.” The piece, slugged “Russian Outlets Amplify Conspiracies,” warned: 

Russia-linked outlets are also copying election conspiracies from US publications verbatim. ZeroHedge, a known promoter of conspiracy theories and Russian propaganda that republishes RT content, is actively reprinting content from fringe sources that claims the establishment is manipulating legal and electoral system to ‘steal’ the election. Examples include an article by James Bovard originally published in The American Conservative, which alleges legal efforts to protect voting rights are part of a Democrat conspiracy to enable fraud.

“Legal efforts to protect voting rights”?

Like the unmanned ballot drop boxes that the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled were illegal after the 2020 election?

Like the torrent of unverified mail-in ballots, although the New York Times warned in 2012 were “fraud in voting by mail is… vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention”?

Like the controversies over whether people casting a vote should be required to show personal identification like they do when taking a flight, buying a beer, or renting a car? 

My piece ridiculed a banner front page New York Times headline one week after the 2020 election: “Election Officials Nationwide Find No Fraud.” How did the Times’ reporters confirm there was “no fraud”? They asked government officials and then dutifully reported what they were told. 

And now a federally-funded think tank is claiming that anyone who warns of election fraud is a Russian tool. 

DFRLab presumes my guilt-by-association is established by stating that ZeroHedge, one of the most popular news websites, reposted my article. And how do they prove that ZeroHedge is a Russian tool? By linking to a 2021 Atlantic Council piece slamming that website for publishing allegations that the Covid-19 virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That was heresy three years ago, but is now an accepted account at numerous federal agencies, including the FBI.

The Atlantic Council’s DFRLab is a formal part of the Election Integrity Partnership that was condemned by federal judges for censoring social media during the 2020 election. In 2018, Congress created a new federal agency—the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). CISA realized that it would be politically and legally perilous to directly muzzle Americans, so it relied on “censorship by surrogate.” The feds evaded the Constitution by subcontracting the destruction of freedom of speech. CISA partnered with federal grantees and the DFRLab to form the Election Integrity Partnership a hundred days before the 2020 presidential election. That project, along with the efforts of other federal agencies, created an “unrelenting pressure” with “the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens,” according to a ruling last year by federal Judge Terry Doughty.

CISA targeted American citizens who complained about elections, and any criticism tacitly became a threat to the nation’s election infrastructure. Contractors composing the Election Integrity Partnership filed endless objections to Americans’ online posts with social media firms. Most of the censorship during the 2020 election cycle targeted posts “related to delegitimizing the election results,” the court decision noted. Once the government began censoring, the definition of misinformation mushroomed. The Election Integrity Partnership bragged about targeting social media posts merely for being “out of context” or “exaggerating issues.” Many of those alleged factual infractions were piddling compared to the sweeping falsehoods proclaimed by both Trump and Biden. As Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online observed, “the censorship focus was always and consistently foremost targeted at speech casting doubt on mail-in ballots,” devastating “the ability of concerned citizens to pressure their state representatives to take legal action on changing voting procedures” to prevent fraud. Those mail-in ballots delivered the presidency to Joe Biden. Federal Judge Terry Doughty on July 4, 2023 condemned the Biden administration for potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” That verdict was ratified in September 2023 by a federal appeals court ruling slamming the White House and federal agencies for actions that resulted in “suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.” 

This is the third presidential election in a row in which the Washington elite have screamed RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA! to shroud their machinations. 

Special Counsel John Durham reported last year that, in mid-2016, after the shellacking she suffered from her email scandal, “[the Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary] Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” President Barack Obama was briefed on the Clinton proposal “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” FBI officials relied on the “Clinton Plan” to target the Trump campaign even though no FBI personnel apparently took “any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence,” the Durham report noted. The first three years of Trump’s presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. In 2019, Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally admitted that there were no grounds to prosecute Trump or his officials for colluding with Russia.

In 2020, Hunter Biden’s laptop revealed vast corruption by the Biden family influence-peddling operation. Antony Blinken, then a top Biden adviser, orchestrated a letter from 51 top intelligence officials claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was nothing but a Russian disinformation campaign. That letter helped torpedo potential political damage from the laptop and assure Biden victory.

And now a federally-funded think tank is taking to the barricades to denounce warnings about voter fraud as another Russian disinformation campaign. Is DFRLab seeking to “pre-bunk” any reports of election fraud as a foreign disinformation? In reality, “disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.

American elections have seen fierce disputes over the legitimacy of votes going all the way to Thomas Jefferson’s victory over John Adams in 1800. When did ballots—or even alleged ballots—become sacred? Perhaps when the ruling class decided that elections themselves must be hallowed to place a halo over winning politicians. How else can Americans be swayed to unquestioningly submit to ever-greater subjugation? 

The efforts to “save democracy” become more perverse with every election.