Why do people believe that Putin is going to limit himself to mere disinformation in this election? Trump has said outright that he won’t, under any circumstances, concede. He has methodically worked to dismantle our democratic institutions. He has threatened to lock up his political enemies. His attorney general has urged prosecutors to charge protestors with sedition. Trump fired five inspectors general this year and gutted the leadership at the National Counterterrorism Center. He forced governors into a bid-warring for PPE. Yesterday, he told his white supremacist militia supporters to "stand back and stand by." A lot of people (myself included) think that American democracy is on the brink of collapse. This is Putin’s DREAM.
When protestors are marching in the streets, when right-wing militias and police departments clash with protestors far more violently than they are doing today, do you really think that Putin is going to restrain himself? When authoritarian regimes around the world have been on the brink of collapse and the U.S. has seen an opening for democracy (or whatever else that is perceived to be in the interests of the United States), America has not been a model of restraint. All too frequently America has stepped right in with covert - and sometimes overt - operations.
The Soviet Union did the same and Russia has continued that tradition. In 2019, Russia provided military support to Maduro in Venezuela during its election crisis. That support appeared to be more a show of force against the U.S. than a willingness to go to war on Maduro's behalf. While Trump's rhetoric at the time was against both Maduro and Russia, we should note that Maduro stayed in power. Russia won that confrontation. It appears to have just been political theater.
Such blatant and overt military support of Trump after our upcoming election would (probably) backfire and is therefore unlikely. It is easily conceivable, however, that not only would Putin decide to take covert actions in the U.S. but that Trump would welcome those actions. He might even request them outright. Even so, we shouldn't dismiss out of hand outright military interference by Russia. Tensions between the two militaries have recently increased both around the world and just off our shores.
So expecting Putin to exercise self-restraint when it comes to our election is, simply put, wishful thinking. Russia and the United States are ENEMIES. Don’t forget that. As distracting as everything else is, don’t forget that Russia is actively our enemy and Russia is not in hibernation. There is zero reason - zero - to think Putin isn’t already planning covert activities around this election that go well beyond simple disinformation campaigns. Believing otherwise is utterly naive. We cannot behave as if we are isolated. We cannot be so absorbed in the threat of an authoritarian president that we only see the shadow of the very real external threats we also face. Nor should we ignore the internal threats that Trump is using to his advantage.
Moreover, we should not be treating the internal and external threats as if they were totally unrelated, either. Trump treats Putin as an ally. He embraces Putin so openly that many people have forgotten just how much of an enemy Russia actually is. As recently as a few months ago we learned the Russia had placed bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers. It should set off our alarm bells that Trump appears to be totally fine with that. Earlier this month four U.S. troops were injured after a Russian vehicle rammed them and Trump, again, appears to be fine with that.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's final bipartisan report on Russian interference in the 2016 election found numerous connections that link the Trump campaign to Russian intelligence. Both Republicans and Democrats agree the connections existed; they just disagree on whether or not these connections were intentional by the Trump campaign. The disagreement exists because the conclusions were based on "fragmentary information." In other words, we still don't have the full picture.
That report also found that while the FBI didn’t act aggressively enough to warn the Democratic National Committee about the hacking against it, the DNC also didn’t take the warnings seriously enough. The DNC, and liberals in general, are repeating the same mistake in underestimating the threat that Russia poses this time around. But this time the danger is much graver.
Liberals are simply not paranoid enough. They think being paranoid in any situation - including ones that absolutely justify paranoia - is always, in every case, evidence of mental illness. That’s stupid. Paranoia also means “excessive suspicion of others’ motives”. You’re probably thinking “I don’t want to have excessive suspicion. I want to have appropriate suspicion, reasonable suspicion. I don’t want to be like those conspiracy theorists.” Well, here’s the thing: it’s simply not possible to be suspicious in exactly the right amount. The stakes are very, very, very high here. Wouldn’t you rather be too suspicious - and wrong, than not suspicious enough - and wrong? If you are suspicious about a thing, you at least check it out. If there is a possibility the thing is true you even prepare for it. If you were right, you might be able to head something horrible off. If you were wrong, so what? You put some effort into something that wasn’t necessary. Maybe some people looked at you sideways. Again, so what? But if you AREN’T suspicious when you should have been you get blindsided. You not only don’t prevent what then happens but you don’t even know how bad it might be until it actually happens.
Trump is taking advantage of liberal's aversion to appearing paranoid. "Radical Left Democrats are going CRAZY!" he proclaims. In response, liberals try to remain calm and not get too carried away with accusations. He's basically making you gaslight yourselves.
If the shoe were on the other foot and a Democratic strongman president were aligned with Russia, conservatives would not make this mistake. The main reason they are making it now is because they are so focused on cementing their ideology into the court system that they can’t see the bigger picture.
Let’s go back to what happened in 2016. There is overwhelming evidence that Trump and his campaign worked with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Yeah, I know, Barr told us there was “no collusion”. Anybody who has actually followed that issue to any real degree though, and who hasn’t drunk Trump’s kool-aid, is fully aware that while it’s true we don’t have enough evidence to prove criminal conduct beyond a reasonable doubt in court, there is a whole hell of a lot of evidence that supports the collusion theory. There is certainly enough evidence of it that we should be looking for, and preparing for, Trump and Putin to be working closely together on strategies to keep Trump in office in this election.
You may think a Russian plot to infiltrate the U.S. government and to put a businessman with ties to the Russian mafia in the highest office in the land is beyond far-fetched. You may think it’s too complicated to be possible. That’s just a failure of imagination. Your inability to picture it says nothing whatsoever about someone else’s ability to think of it, plan it, or execute it. You ridicule people for thinking the moon landing was faked. Political scheming is far less complicated than that. You just need an excellent grasp of several social sciences rather than of several physical sciences.
You should also remember that the Mueller Report, on page 17 in the Executive Summary to Volume I, said (emphasis mine):
"Second, while the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges. Among other things, the evidence was not sufficient to charge any Campaign official as an unregistered agent of the Russian government or other Russian principal."
To be clear, the Mueller Report said "the" evidence wasn't sufficient to charge. That is a very high standard. Nevertheless, we can tell from the wording that there was "some" evidence that at least one Campaign official was (and undoubtedly still is) an unregistered agent of Russia.
Now let's look at the biggest internal threat. Three years ago on this blog, I wrote about the threat posed by armed militias and white supremacists in law enforcement. I said:
“We have repeatedly seen Trump instruct the police to go ahead and rough people up. This is obviously intended to increase the tension between police and civilians. He does this while aligning himself with law enforcement which will increase his support from officers that otherwise had nothing to do with the alt-right before. They will back him because he backs them, never-mind that he is making the tensions worse. If Trump calls on the police to, for example, restore order to a Congress that he himself has broken, some of them will certainly heed the call. Those that serve with noble intentions and who have not fallen for his divisive tactics will unlikely be prepared to stop what may ensue, even if their numbers are greater.
"This is not to suggest that a paramilitary-style takeover of Congress is imminent. The point is simply that it appears he may be preparing for it. Before he might take that step, I would expect that he would ensure he has at least a handful of alt-right backers within the House and Senate. There is little doubt that the alt-right will win seats in the next election. What we don't know is how many he will get nor how many he needs.”
It is now imminent. Worse, the police forces appear to be pretty much united behind Trump. As Trump told us in his debate with Biden last night he has the support of all law enforcement agencies across the country. He reiterated this on both Facebook and Twitter: "Joe Biden could not name a single Law Enforcement group that supports his candidacy". If that doesn’t alarm you, you are really not paying attention.
Trump is running on a “Law and Order” campaign. To his supporters that means anti-crime and anti-antifa. To Trump it means he has support to usher in a police state that he can use at whim to crack down on Democrat-led cities and on whomever he sees as his political enemies.
Now I’m not telling anyone to wear a tinfoil hat. I’m telling you to have a healthy suspicion. Right now, that means having a whole helluva lot of it. But don’t panic. Whatever you do, don’t panic. Seriously. If we are going to have any chance of meeting this threat, we have to stay clear-headed. That means we have to stay calm. But we also have to see the threat in its entirety. So no sticking your head in the sand either. We have to see the threat, plan for it, and act. And we are running out of time so we have to do it very, very, very quickly.
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