Disinformation vs. the Pandemic

Only now is the strategy being revealed, is it too late to stop it?

The truth seems to always arrive too late these days to actually make a difference. But late is better than never. Back in 2017, The Guardian reporter Tom McCarthy published a story with the headline: How Russia Used Social Media to Divide Americans. The subtitle read: Russian trolls and bots focused on controversial topics in an effort to stoke political confusion.

What was published by The Guardian on July 15 only solidifies the evidence reported by McCarthy four years ago: Russian trolls and bots focused on controversial topics in an effort to stoke political division on an enormous scale — and it hasn’t stopped, experts say, reads the latest subhead. So what’s this got to do with the current state of disinformation? It hasn’t stopped.

The disinformation programs continue to divide the Americans left, right and center, even to the point that many Americans have shut the news off, preferring ignorance of the facts than confusion. This turn of events is the result of a classic psyops attack, one successful enough to make our own CIA proud if it weren’t executed by our country’s adversaries. As you can see the ex-president and his allies are still propagating the lies about stolen elections, vaccines, masks, critical race theory and transgender rights.  In fact, pick a disruptive topic on any given week and the echo chamber of MAGA conspiralists will organize on social media then gather outside a random Korean day spa in Los Angeles to cause confusion and chaos. The cops are called in and arrests are made and then there’s another battle over free speech, police brutality and suppression.

All of this disruption is to what end? According to The Guardian, Russian President Vladimir Putin, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them ‘social turmoil’ in the U.S. and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.

And currently this all plays to the benefit of Trumlicans, who are intent on blocking any of President Joe Biden’s or the congressional Democrats legislation for infrastructure, expanded voting rights and even the investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building.  Yes, that was an insurrection, not a riot, not a parade nor a peaceful demonstration, but an indisputable attempt to overthrow our federal government.

Proponents of this disinformation virus are not unlike those Confederate soldiers and sympathizers who for years, decades even, after the American Civil War never accepted the victory of the North over the South. Seventy years afterwards, whole Southern states were commemorating the “Lost Cause” with statuary for a war that even Gen. Robert E. Lee said was best buried and forgotten. There’s no such humility or circumspection from the anti-vaxxer crowd, MAGA-true believers, Proud Boys acolytes and Three Percenters! Nor should you expect it. These folks are seriously intent on starting the next civil war. 

If you have any doubts about this perspective, after some 579 people (neo-confederates ) have been charged with crimes and were arrested from the capital insurrection, I would direct you to read the news report on our website titled, Anatomy of an Insurrection: How Military Veterans and Other Rioters Carried Out the Jan. 6 Assault on Democracy (https://tinyurl.com/Anatomy-insurrection).

“Every single person charged, at the very least, contributed to the inability of Congress to carry out the certification of our presidential election,” prosecutors wrote in a memorandum filed with the D.C. district court.

Under any other circumstance, this would be called treason — a charge with which all who participated in the insurrection should be stuck. Even the orange guy himself should at least be charged with incitement to riot and conspiracy to foment insurrection if not treason for attempting a coup d’état. 

The evidence is just now beginning to leak out with books like Michael Woff’s Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency; Michael C Bender’s Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost and  I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonning and Philip Rucker. 

All of this along with Gen. Mark Milley’s assessment of Trump’s intentions to hold on to power regardless of the vote was reported this way. “In the days leading up to Jan. 6,” Leonnig and Rucker write, “Milley was worried about Trump’s call to action. ‘Milley told his staff that he believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military.’”

Yet, instead of charging these trespassers of our democracy with misdemeanors and minor felony charges like Anna Morgan Lloyd, of Indiana, who was ordered by a federal judge to serve three years of probation, perform 120 hours of community service and pay $500 in restitution after admitting to entering the Capitol, she easily should be serving 5 to 10 years in prison. She pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge under a deal with prosecutors. The latest one convicted, Michael Curzio, was sentenced to just six months imprisonment.

And still from Arizona’s Cyber Ninja recount to Texas’ stalled voter suppression laws and across this nation in every red state and county as the disinformation flies, vaccination rates stall and the COVID-19 Delta variant spreads the one thing we can be certain of in these times is that the virus may do for the Democrats what legislation can not. The current data shows that the highest rates of infection are occurring in the same counties with the lowest vaccination rates and those just happen to be where Trump won the most votes.

Perhaps this is the proof that Charles Darwin was right.