Gaza, "Psyop Brain," and the Long Shadow of Russiagate
What happens to politics when everything is a psyop?
For the last couple of years, I’ve been joking that the clearest effect of Russian interference in the 2016 election has been the spread of something I’ve called “Psyop Brain” among the Democratic leadership and MSNBC addicts. By this, I mean a tendency to view all domestic politics and political disagreement through the lens of covert action and clandestine foreign intelligence operations. In this view of the world, Bernie Sanders is not a frumpily dressed, failed presidential candidate, but a paid Russian asset bent on weakening America and corrupting the minds of the youth. TikTok is nothing but a nefarious Chinese plot to harvest location data and other forms of kompromat on U.S. Senators, while tricking tweens into believing Xi Jinping Thought.
But over the last year or so, the joke has become less and less funny. People have started to cite my shitposts. Congressional Democrats have allied with some of the most right-wing figures in the country to force ByteDance to divest from TikTok, something which may end up functioning as a TikTok ban. And since the October 7th attacks and Israel’s bloody war in Gaza, high-ranking Democrats have gotten in the habit of questioning the motives and allegiance of people who oppose the actions of the Israeli government. Since the wave of campus occupations that have swept the country in recent days, the situation has gotten even worse. Nancy Pelosi, speaking to RTÉ news, said the campus occupations have a “Russian tinge” to them, claiming that the protests are being actively encouraged by Russia as part of a strategy to help Trump win.
It might be comforting to think of this as a modern form of red-baiting, something said cynically and instrumentally, with some slight modifications for the post-Soviet era. But I’ve come to think they actually believe what they’re saying. The former speaker, after all, has a long history of making comments like this, even behind closed doors. During her first meeting with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, Pelosi told the newly-elected representative that the slogan “Abolish ICE” had been injected into American discourse by Russian intelligence to harm the Democrats. Ocasio-Cortez left the meeting stunned, asking herself “This is how the leader of the party thinks?”
Discussion of Russian electoral interference in the 2016 election normally focuses on attempts to sway the electorate, either through disinformation campaigns, social media manipulation, or through their (frankly pathetic) attempts to influence public opinion through Facebook ad buys. These conversations have never sat quite right with me, because they tend to rely on far-fetched, long-discredited theories of media effects and propaganda, overlooking the most obvious effects of Russian intelligence operations, namely on the thinking of the Democratic leadership itself.
On July 22, 2016, a few days before the beginning of the Democratic National Convention, almost 20,000 emails from Democratic Party staffers were uploaded to WikiLeaks. At the time, most of the conversation about the leak focused on the DNC's bias against Bernie Sanders during the primaries, something which reignited tensions between the progressive and establishment wings of the party. In the months that followed, the DNC leaks gradually became incorporated into a broader narrative about Russia’s attempt to sway the outcome of the 2016 election. However, I suspect Russian ambitions were likely more modest than directly flipping the election for Trump. More narrowly, it appears Russian intelligence viewed the incoming Clinton administration as hostile and aimed to damage it, and by extension the Democratic Party itself, through the selective leaking of these emails. The strategic logic behind such leaks aligns with the ideas put forth by WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange.
I’m not much of a fan of Assange, especially these days, but he has been very clear about his thinking over the years. In a set of white papers published in 2006 called “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” and “Conspiracy as Governance,” he laid out a theory on how to incapacitate and change the behavior of the governing class, one that drew on the way the U.S. intelligence community understood terrorist organizations during the war on terror. Adapting the methods used by U.S. intelligence to model terrorist networks as computational systems that take in information, communicate, and coordinate actions, Assange applied this network analysis framework to portray the governing classes as conspiratorial networks operating in a similar manner.
The details of the theory aren’t important, but it’s important to note that the goal isn’t to shift public opinion; rather, it is to weaken an organization's ability to coordinate and share information among its members. Viewed in this way, the purpose of a project like WikiLeaks is not directly about exposing injustice or corruption. The revelations themselves are beside the point; what is important is the reaction the leak generates. As with the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, the goal is basically to mess with the heads of one’s targets, slowly making them paranoid, distrustful, and unable to function.
Now, I should say, I don’t really buy Assange’s framework here. Like the defense intellectuals he draws on, I think the approach is far too formal, far too abstract, and way too (for lack of a better term) computer-brained. Despite that, I think it’s clarifying because it suggests that Russia and Wikileaks goal might not have to influence the electorate, but instead something more like the disruptive “ratfucking” that intelligence agencies always do, to disrupt the functioning of an incoming Clinton administration that both parties viewed as a hostile force.
To my mind, it’s hard not to see this effort as having something like its desired effect. Since 2016, key figures within the Democratic Party and their allies in the media have been unable to see domestic politics outside of the framework of the psyop mindset, viewing every policy disagreement as evidence of either Russian (or lately Chinese) brainwashing, or as evidence that those figures are working directly for foreign intelligence. Like the targets of COINTELPRO, they are unable to see beyond the framework of a psyop, because they themselves have the target of one. Their personal emails, their secrets, their petty office squabbles have been put out in public for everyone to see, and this experience has made them distrustful and paranoid.
It has also reshaped the way many of them look at the world and basic political questions. This tendency to interpret disagreement through the lens of foreign manipulation has resulted not only in a growing disconnect between the party establishment and the left, but has served as an instrument of epistemic closure, making the party increasingly unable to interpret political reality. If young people disagree with the leadership on Gaza, it has to be because of disinformation campaigns, or because of Chinese TikTok brainwashing, or because the protest movements have been funded by Iran or Russia, it can’t be because of clear moral convictions.
This is an increasingly dangerous situation, if the margins are anywhere near as close as they were in 2016, Democrats are going to have to rely on the youth vote to put them over the edge in November, something that won’t happen if the party continues to treat them like the gullible dupes of a foreign power. And it’s not just the young, if polling data is to be believed, a majority of voters, and something like 75% of Democrats disapprove of Israel’s military action in Gaza.
And it’s not just the electoral consequences. Repression on campuses is growing more and more violent. National security logics are increasingly being used to regulate speech and militarize social media. Over the last eight years, we’ve been constantly warned about the threat of fascism and creeping authoritarianism. It may come from Trump. But it might just as easily be the product of good, old-fashioned bipartisanship, of an elite brokered peace.