Countering Russia's Insurgency

To mark this week’s Democratic Convention, we send along a newly published interview of Simon by Chauncey DeVega of Salon, the on-line magazine.  It covers a lot of ground, and includes an extended section about the how the Democratic Party has been, through a period of repeated modernization and innovation, the most successful center-left political party in the developed world, and has been for some time.  These are the themes we hit in our signature presentation, “With Democrats Things Get Better,” which will be shown again next Wednesday.  Try to sit in if you can. 

The interview also does a deep dive on a subject NDN has invested a great deal of energy in over the past four years – countering the rise of illiberal politics, here in the US and abroad.  With the Senate releasing clear, incontrovertible evidence of the President’s partnering with Russia to cheat his way to victory in 2016, we need to make sure we are not now – on the postal service, on his use of the White House for partisan reasons, his corrupting of the IG system and DOJ itself, the Kayne absurdity, on Russia’s return – looking the other way; but rather as we’ve been arguing on the President’s recent sabotage of the postal service, fighting him with everything we have.  It is what our democracy, and all democracies deserve – a vigorous defense, a plan for victory. 

While here, feel free to check out our regular series of pieces looking at the 2020 election including significant deep dives on recent national and state polling; our months long advocacy for the need for a national strategy to defeat COVID; Rob Shapiro’s new Washington Monthly essay on how the GOP is flirting once again with ushering in an all-out depression; Simon’s extensive commentary in Ron Brownstein’s New Atlantic piece on Trump’s weaponization of the USPS and Census, “Just How Far Will Trump Go?” and Mike Tomasky’s rave review of our new presentation, “With Democrats Things Get Better” in the Daily Beast. 

Other work you may have find of interest: 

Congress, States, Cities Must Rise Up, Fight for the USPS – 8/13/20 - NDN is encouraging elected officials from across the country to rise up and help end the President's sabotage of the postal service. 

Taking Trump’s Ongoing Assault On Our Democracy Seriously - 8/10/20 - The President is on a political crime spree - breaking laws, cheating in the election, encouraging Russia to intervene on his behalf - again.   We cannot let him get away with it - again.

Returning to School Is Going To Be Very Hard – 8/3/20 - Just like the President has left the nation to fend for itself in fighting COVID, he is leaving all of us, and our children, to go it alone on returning to school.  It is "tragic and grotesque." 

Analysis: Another Week of Ghastly Polls for the GOP, Loud Dems, Trump’s Illiberalism -  7/25/20 - Our weekly look at 2020 polling finds more brutal poll numbers for the GOP, Dems building a 2020 juggernaut and mystification and worry about Trump's emerging strategy for staying in power.

Analysis: Should Dems Go For It? - 7/9/20 - The Biden campaign faces a big strategy choice in the coming days - how manystates to play in? How big should the battlefield be? Argument for going big is very compelling right now. 

The Coming Reckoning With Russia - Simon Rosenberg, NDN, 6/29/20- Someday, soon, America will have to look at and make sense of Russia’s years of attacks on our interests, its penetration of our political system, its brazen manipulation of our President.  It will be a very ugly but necessary process.

The Coming Reckoning With Russia - Someday, soon, America will have to look at and make sense of Russia’s years of attacks on our interests, its penetration of our political system, its brazen manipulation of our President.  It will be a very ugly but necessary process. It is possible that news of Russia waging a successful campaign of assassination of US and UK troops in Afghanistan will be the impetus for a thorough public accounting of Putin’s slow burn insurgency against the US and the West – and it should.

The Jan 2017 Intelligence Community report on Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election starts this way: “Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.”

Escalation here is the key.  Since its successful installation of a friendly in the White House, Russia has worked hard to leverage this new valuable new ally.  As NDN has written, over the past several years Trump has worked diligently to align the US with Russia’s interests in Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iran, Europe, and the UK, and has systemically weakened core pillars of the US-imagined global order including the G7, NATO, the WTO, WHO, the CIA and the FBI.  He has feted autocrats in the White House, and supported Putin friendly right wing politicians in Europe working to weaken the EU and democratic institutions there.  And the US itself if far weaker today – tens of million unemployed, a virus raging unchecked, racial division, rising right wing domestic political violence – and our standing in the world perhaps permanently diminished.

Reviewing the news in recent months, it is clear that Putin’s strategic campaign against the US is still very active, and evolving.  Russia has waged an expansive campaign to forge online relationships here in the US with military veterans: is helping turn white supremacy into a transnational terror movement with US affiliates; is stepping up efforts to cyber exploit new remote working arrangements by the US government and companies; is working to once again influence/intervene in our domestic politics and elections; and now we learn of this new campaign of assassinations of US troops in Afghanistan.

What remains so concerning is that not only has the US government not launched a sustained and public effort to get Russia to back off, the Trump White House keeps creating space for Russia to executive its campaigns against the US.  Trump has downplayed or ignored rising right wing violence in the US and abroad, so much so that our European allies are unhappy with current levels of cooperation; fired the acting DNI over briefing Congress about Russia’s operations targeting the US; has worked to exonerate Mike Flynn and Roger Stone, aides who most directly conspired with Russia against US interests in 2016 and 2017; resumed his rancid campaign to re-admit Russia to the G7, and this year blew up the G7 itself;  just last week brought the illiberal Polish leader, Duda, to the White House to bolster his re-election; and has now on the issue of the Russian assassination campaign issued a statement which could have been written by Putin himself.

NDN believes that when it comes to Russia, the President has been committing treason or its philosophical equivalent since the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June of 2016.  However the illicit bonds were formed, the US has become aligned with Putin, acting as a global partner and ally in advancing his dark agenda, here and abroad.  It is critical that US policy makers use this new Putin outrage to launch a sustained discussion about what’s happened, begin to plan a sustained response to roll back the gains Putin has made, and put the US back on the side of the global liberal order we’ve built and led for decades.  There are many messes which will have to be cleaned up form this terrible chapter in our history – but Trump’s appeasement and embrace of Putin may be among the important and consequential for the world and the future of our once inspiring republic.

As we have previously discussed, we’ve begun a project to locate and publicize high volume pro-Trump accounts on Twitter. These “amplifiers” are a critical part of the modern social media ecosystem and are also an important part of how Trump and his allies move their narratives through the body politic here in the US. It's our sense that all of us need to get a better understanding of these accounts and how they influence our domestic discourse. 

As our research has evolved, so has Twitter. In September of 2019, Twitter began suspending thousands of accounts for manipulation as part of their ongoing battle against disinformation. We went ahead and reviewed our database to check in on which accounts were active. Out of the 441 accounts, we found that 59 are no longer active. These 59 accounts range from some of the highest-performing to some of the lower performing accounts. As our landscape continues evolving, we will be sure to keep checking on how many accounts in our database are suspended for violating Twitter’s platform.

You can find some of the most aggressive accounts below, or you can see all 441 of the accounts we’ve found so far in the attached pdf. You will now notice a column indicating if the account is still active. Feel free to use this information for whatever work you are doing in this space. Our goal is get a better sense of how many of accounts like these are out there – is it a few hundred? A few thousand? More? Help us figure that out.