Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and author who has become one of the nation’s leading Russia experts and one of its most relentless and vocal critics of Vladimir Putin. She has lived her life on and off in the U.S. and Russia, but as a Jewish lesbian and mother of three children, she left Russia in 2013 and moved back to the U.S. in part because
she felt threatened by the increasingly anti-LGBT climate there, one that began particularly targeting LGBT adopted families with discriminatory legislation.
Throughout the years Gessen (pictured, above) has become one of the
go-to Kremlin critics for the U.S. media, publishing harshly anti-Putin reporting and commentary in numerous media outlets, including
the New York Times,
the Washington Post, Slate, Harper’s and
several articles about political repression in Russia for the Intercept. She has also become a virulent critic of Donald Trump,
writing shortly after the election that “Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won,” while describing the critical lessons that can be learned on how to resist Trump’s autocratic impulses by studying Putin.
She now has
a new article in the New York Review of Books – entitled “Russia: the Conspiracy Trap” – that I cannot recommend highly enough. Its primary purpose is to describe, and warn about, the insane and toxic conspiracy-mongering about Russia that has taken over not the fringe, dark corners of the internet that normally traffic in such delusional tripe, but rather mainstream U.S. media outlets and the Democratic Party. Few articles have illustrated the serious, multi-faceted dangers of what has become this collective mania in the U.S. as well as Gessen’s does.
To begin, Gessen details several examples of classic, evidence-free, unhinged, and increasingly xenophobic conspiracy theorizing masquerading as serious news in mainstream outlets such as MSNBC, CNN, and the Washington Post. Routine diplomatic interactions are depicted as dark and sinister if they involve Russians. When the most flamboyant, alarmist, tabloid-style Russia stories from leading news outlets collapse (
as so many have), or when Trump’s actions (such as hiring numerous anti-Russia hawks for key positions) explode the “Putin’s puppet” narrative, it makes no difference to our mainstream conspiracy obsessives because – as she puts it – “such is the nature of conspiracy thinking that facts can do nothing to change it.”
Wild, melodramatic claims about hidden Russian plotting and Trump collusion are routinely and constantly hyped by leading media outlets based on nothing but their imaginations or, at best, coordinated whispers from intelligence officials utterly insusceptible to verification, from operatives trained in disinformation. As she writes:
The backbone of the rapidly yet endlessly developing Trump-Putin story is leaks from intelligence agencies, and this is its most troublesome aspect. Virtually none of the information can be independently corroborated. The context, sequence, and timing of the leaks is determined by people unknown to the public, which is expected to accept anonymous stories on faith; nor have we yet been given any hard evidence of active collusion by Trump officials. . . .
The dream fueling the Russia frenzy is that it will eventually create a dark enough cloud of suspicion around Trump that Congress will find the will and the grounds to impeach him. If that happens, it will have resulted largely from a media campaign orchestrated by members of the intelligence community—setting a dangerous political precedent that will have corrupted the public sphere and promoted paranoia. And that is the best-case outcome. . . . More likely, the Russia allegations will not bring down Trump.
The crux of her article is the point that has been driving everything I’ve been writing and saying about this topic for months: that this obsession with Russia conspiracy tales is poisoning all aspects of U.S. political discourse and weakening any chance for resisting Trump’s actual abuses and excesses. Those who wake up every day to hype the latest episode of this Russia/Trump spy drama tell themselves that they’re bravely undermining and subverting Trump, but they’re doing exactly the opposite.
This crazed conspiracy mongering is further discrediting U.S. media outlets, making Washington seem even more distant from and irrelevant to the lives of millions of Americans, degrading discourse to the lowliest Trumpian circus level on which he thrives, and is misdirecting huge portions of opposition energy and thought into an exciting but fictitious spy novel – all of which directly redounds to Trump’s benefit. As Gessen puts it in the key sentence that ought to be pinned everywhere in neon lights:
Russiagate is helping [Trump]—both by distracting from real, documentable, and documented issues, and by promoting a xenophobic conspiracy theory in the cause of removing a xenophobic conspiracy theorist from office.
...
Ultimately, what makes Gessen’s article so important – aside from the fact that partisan smear artists cannot dismiss her on the ground that she loves Putin and works for the Kremlin – is that it focuses on the key point: namely, that this fixation on primitive conspiracy-mongering is just a slothful way of avoiding the real work of meaningfully opposing Trump. As she explains, this bottomless, ultimately pointless obsession with Russia has utterly crowded out effective strategies for opposing Trump, and has obscured many of the
truly damaging policies he is implementing with little notice:
Meanwhile, while Russia continues to dominate the front pages, Trump will continue waging war on immigrants, cutting funding for everything that’s not the military, assembling his cabinet of deplorables—with six Democrats voting to confirm Ben Carson for Housing, for example, and ten to confirm Rick Perry for Energy. According to the Trump plan, each of these seems intent on destroying the agency he or she is chosen to run—to carry out what Steve Bannon calls the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” As for Sessions, in his first speech as attorney general he
promised to cut back civil rights enforcement and he has already abandoned a Justice Department case against a discriminatory Texas voter ID law. But it was his Russia lie that grabbed the big headlines.
Indeed, even the most plausible plank of the story – that the Russians were behind the hacking of Podesta and the DNC – has been widely accepted as Truth despite no evidence from the U.S. Government. As Gessen notes: “A later building block in the story, which has become its virtual cornerstone, is the
joint intelligence report on Russian interference in the campaign, which was released in December and is, plainly, laughable.”
Worst of all, our discourse is being drowned by irrational, highly corrosive delusions and feverish conspiracy theorizing – not just from Trump, who built his political career on a racist and deranged conspiracy theory about Obama’s true birthplace, but also from those who have anointed themselves leaders of the Resistance against him. How can one credibly denounce Trump’s birtherism or his fact-free accusation that Obama ordered his wiretapping if one is simultaneously spreading the most blatantly evidence-free claims and conspiracies or venerating those who have built their new platforms based on feeding hungry partisans flagrantly fraudulent “reporting”?
The Russia narrative dominates national discourse, as it has for months, and becomes progressively more removed from evidence. As Gessen concludes: “What is indisputable is that the protracted national game of connecting the Trump-Putin dots is an exercise in conspiracy thinking. That does not mean there was no conspiracy. And yet, a possible conspiracy is a poor excuse for conspiracy thinking.”
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