Adam Riggio - Lost in the Woods: Anxiety as a Weapon of Information Warfare
Written by: Adam Riggio
In our current media ecology, it’s easier than ever to engage in information warfare. As I discussed over the last weeks, there are many different political actors who use misinformation to spread confusion and paranoia throughout a population. As a result of that paranoia, many progressive movements face the danger of mutual distrust.
Today, I want to examine the effects of information warfare by its long-term effects on the targets: Ordinary people like you and me.
How Anxiety Creates a World Without Credibility
As progressives, we earn our anxieties, which are deeply profound. We work and support political movements that improve people’s material lives and redress past and ongoing injustice. We are deeply conscious of the dangers posed by the plutocrats so close to the levers of state and corporate power.
At some point in our lives, we’ve felt the weapons of suppression target and hit us, or at least we’ve known someone who did. The many fascisms of the world’s revanchists have many weapons: state police, surveillance, vigilantism, ostracism, popular and media demonization. We are not wrong to see enemies in many places, but that anxiety can be easily manipulated to see enemies wrongly.
We cast around our world for someone who support who isn’t, in some way, corrupt. The savviest leaders of corrupt plutocrats the world over are able to play on that desperation of the progressive idealist. Our greatest fear is that the world is incurably corrupt and will always be ruled by misery and exploitation. As our greatest fear, it’s always on our minds.
We imagine vanquishing this fear by overcoming that corruption: a genuinely fair system of laws, government that works for everyone’s prosperity and repairing its past injustices, leadership in all our communities to build true friendships that overcome past hatreds and prejudices.
But we don’t live in the most optimistic times. The hope that motivates any progressive is especially fragile on this day. It doesn’t take much now to shake your faith that the world will ever be anything but life as a rich man’s meal. Everyone around us appears compromised by deep links to those few who loot and pocket billions of dollars every year.
A Spectre of Corruption Destroying Democracy
With the American Democratic Party nomination coming down to Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, one example stands out as a perfect hit for the paranoia of such information weapons.
It’s about an op-ed that appeared in The Guardian shortly before the Iowa Presidential caucuses. I know that, in the experience of American politics today, so many events and controversies happen that Zephyr Teachout’s Jan. 20 article may as well have appeared 17 years ago. But it only feels that way. Really, it’s been about six weeks.
Teachout argued that a Bernie Sanders government would be an antidote to the corruption that plagues Washington. That description alone doesn’t exactly narrow down what she was writing about. Perhaps it was about the Super Political Action Committee organizations that flood the Democratic Party with dark money and backroom influence. Perhaps is was about one of the thousands of corrupt actions and relationships cultivated in the Trump administration, the ultimate enemy in the US Presidential election.
Instead, Teachout wrote an article accusing Joe Biden of funneling the cash of corrupt Ukrainian billionaires into his family’s corporate pockets, using business connections of his son Hunter’s position on the natural gas company Burisma’s Board of Directors. Her problem: This is a lie, which Donald Trump continually amplifies, designed to smear Biden and ruin his credibility to succeed in a potential election contest.
Carrying On Despite the Truth
Why would a clearly intelligent professor at a leader American university, who has carried out vibrant and important research, parrot the propaganda lines of Donald Trump? Trump is not a trustworthy figure for any progressive. He is the living embodiment of the system of institutionalized, multi-vector mass cruelty that progressive politics aims to end. He is a wannabe dictator, ignorant lout, and author of ethnic cleansing crimes through brutal immigration raids and internment camps.
The question is especially relevant given when Teachout’s article was released, Jan. 20, 2020. Over Fall 2019, multiple leading national news sources investigated the rumours of corruption about Burisma and the Bidens. The earliest debunking came in May 2019. They all found the rumours utterly false, a fabrication, with no evidence backing up any accusation.
Read investigations from The New Yorker, USA Today, NBC News, the New York Times, and any other reasonably credible source you can find. All of them discovered that the accusations against Joe and Hunter Biden are complete fabrications. Those investigations were all published over October and November 2019, so Teachout had plenty of time to digest what a lie this was, before publishing an article that took its truth for granted.
In fact, most of the legwork of spreading the Burisma conspiracy through mainstream and social media was a product of the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative public relations and publishing house. Its founders include fascist media baron Steve Bannon, while its funding largely comes from white supremacist billionaire Robert Mercer, and his daughter Rebekah Mercer sits on its board of directors. This is exactly the same organization that pushed all the conspiracies against the Clintons leading up to the 2016 election.
Have My Worst Fears Always Been True?
What makes Zephyr Teachout believe what Steve Bannon and Donald Trump have to say about Joe Biden? Her most profound fear, shared in the hearts of all progressives, that so many networks of corruption and greed control so many levers of power in the world, that their control is inevitable.
Democracy doesn’t die with honour. It’s death rattle is, “So what?”
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