The New Red Scare

Nothing rings more like payback than a former soviet spy sowing doubt and mania amongst the American people, radicalizing them to conspire against their own government, all through the puppet of a Dictator fuckboy in an ill-fitting suit.

Thanks, Putin, we have a problem

We, humans, are often blinded by our triggers. The wounds most familiar both consume and become the nagging pain we have grown numb to. For America, that trigger has always been race. So, of course, many were not surprised to see the lie-riddled delusions of our sitting president result in a violent uprising of mass hysteria on January 6th, while others “did not see it coming.” Even fewer were surprised at the stark racism that informed the police response— or lack thereof, while others downplayed it. But what is far more worrisome to me is that no one is blaming Russia for any of it.

Imagine if the very same people — the same lily-white American people — had been radicalized for Islam. Imagine how we’d be responding to it. Imagine how we’d be picking apart, dissecting all of the fringe groups and conspiracies that led them there. Imagine how quickly reiterating any part of that rhetoric afterward would have become political Kryptonite. But we can’t imagine that. Because it’s hard to distinguish rhetoric as toxic if it looks, feels, and sounds like home.

It isn’t just that racist and xenophobic protocols ensure that Islamist extremism will trigger a strong military response, it is that racist and xenophobic signals are our only clear tools for determining if an attack is foreign or dangerous in the first place. Even with World War II, though fascists from white Germany had been aggressively taking over Europe, it took a Japanese act to actually bring America into the war. And how did America respond? By locking up every Japanese person in the states. Meanwhile, we have people today, in Congress defending the alt right personalities and organizations that instigated an attack on our nation’s Capitol.

American democracy is and has always been inherently white. So, of course white threats will always inherently feel American and democratic. White threateners will always be seen as patriots with a right to a public platform for hate speech, regardless of the blatantly enemy-funded anti-American rhetoric they spew.

The Trojan horse is a Russian doll

Now, the very fear stoked by the Red Scare — that a foreign anti-democratic rhetoric would take ahold of our country like a deadly virus and turn Americans against their democracy — has actually come true: A foreign entity has indeed turned American’s against their nation, both figuratively (election fraud, deep state) and literally (anti-maskers).

There is concrete evidence that Russia meddled with the 2016 presidential election, and attempted to do so again in 2020, using tactics to undermine the press and disseminate fake news. Russian intelligence, bots, and money have been linked to the enabling of disinformation about election fraud, the pandemic, pro-gun rhetoric, and Q’anon conspiracy theories. In addition to those purportedly innocuous Russian ties to Trump’s 2016 campaign, there is evidence of active collaboration with Russia and the GOP to re-elect him in 2020.

Doubling down on the unified front behind Trump, the GOP has been put in a position to have to repeatedly defend and downplay any Russian connection to the president — making them susceptible to overlooking real threats for the sake of political footing. This has lead to a large portion of Republicans undermining government efforts to curb the COVID-19 pandemic by sharing said disinformation, leaving us with tens of millions sick, stumbling through unemployment and stalled re-openning/closure measures that ultimately make Americans more vulnerable to disinformation.

We are embarrassed on the international stage, weakened economically, and — though I am a huge supporter of aggressively defunding police enforcement —left with a hostile decrease to and potential compromise of personnel across police, intelligence, and military sectors at a time when threats for armed domestic rebellion are alarmingly high.

Our National Guard is deployed in various states because of both the raging pandemic and the violent insurrection in DC (and chatter of more violent attacks to come.) Our hospitals are strapped to the max. Our Congress is distracted by risks to their own safety while our embarrassing lack of cybersecurity readiness betrays our continued ignorance to foreign risks to our government. And none of Biden’s cabinet members will be confirmed in time for inauguration day, because of partisan stonewalling — at the expense of desperately needed national security.

Essentially, we are divided and wholly unprepared to plan against, let alone respond to any other sort of mass emergency.

Enter the case for the White Menace

When the Kremlin went down the path of employing white supremacy to undermine American stability, they bet on our loyalties to whiteness above all else. And, yes, as many minorities would agree, they probably made a prudent bet. But if our weakness can be used against us, then let it be repurposed in our favor. In pitting white supremacy against American democracy, Russia may have set out to do us a great disservice, but they also handed us an opportunity: We have a path to divorce the crux of Americanism from the stain (and lore) of white supremacy. The first step, though, would be to denounce any and all Q’Anon rhetoric as outright pro-Russian / Anti-American propaganda.

With the common thread across the last five years brought into view, it should be said without a reasonable doubt that Trump is an asset to the Russian government. Whether he is fully aware of the origin of his rhetoric or not, he is the poster-child for an anti-American disinformation campaign.

Senator McCarthy used nationalism to unify Americans against communism, why can’t we now do the same by galvanizing Americans against Russia? Why can’t we permanently rebrand this breed of white nationalism as Russian? Why can’t we shut down these disinformation accounts and lies as foreign acts of war? The Patriot Act gave the government so much power to spy on its own citizens under the guise of security, yet when we need security against our very own people the most, why aren’t we using it to do exactly that? Though I never thought that I’d be one to suggest nationalism as a path to good, I will admit it is effective in mobilizing unity very quickly. And, at the danger of sounding like those backpeddling GOP members, I agree we need unity now more than ever.

Russia’s whiteness proves that white supremacy was always our greatest weakness. It was only a matter of time before someone would seize the opportunity to use it against us. It is time we unify, once and for all, against it.