October 21, 2018
On Friday, federal prosecutors in Virginia unsealed an indictment against Elena Khusyaynova, an accountant employed by Russian troll farm, Concord, for her role in its efforts to interfere with the 2018 midterm elections. Concord was already indicted by the Special Counsel in February for its interference in the 2016 Presidential elections, (Source: “U.S. brings first charge for meddling in the 2018 midterm elections,” by Josh Gerstein, Politico.com, 10/19/18).
The indictment charges that the Russian scheme, dubbed “Project Lakhta” aimed to “sow division and discord in the U.S. political system, including by creating social and political polarization, undermining faith in democratic institutions and influencing U.S. elections, including the 2018 midterms,” (Source: Criminal Complaint, United States v. Khusyaynova, Case No. 1:18-MJ-464 (Dist. Ct., E.D.Va)). The indictment alleges that the budget expended on this criminal conspiracy from 2016 to 2018 was $35 million dollars!
The key insight comes in Paragraph 26 of the criminal complaint, which quotes the directives to members of the conspiracy that they were to “effectively aggravate the conflict between minorities and the rest of the population,” (ibid). Russian malefactors eager to undermine our democracy knew precisely where to look. They knew that exploiting racial animus was a surefire way to destabilize the fragile detente between those who profess to believe in equality and those who hunger for a nakedly white supremacist nation.
The truth is that anti-Black racism is as much of a defining feature of the United States as its Locke and Rousseau inspired Enlightenment philosophy. The founders had to invent the myth of white supremacy in order to reconcile the inherent contradiction between the lofty rhetoric of our founding documents and the decision to harness human beings like beasts of burden to build this country into an economic superpower.
The corresponding belief in Black inferiority that white supremacy requires has proven perniciously durable, shape shifting but never diminishing. After Emancipation, it morphed into Jim Crow, which employed violence, intimidation and unjust laws to ensure that Black people were at the bottom of the American racial hierarchy. After the Civil Rights movement made overt expressions of racism untenable, it was reborn as the “Southern Strategy,” which harnessed white resentment at the loss of unearned privilege inherent in integration.
The Southern Strategy made ruthlessly effective use of code words. Resistance to Black protest was deemed a desire for “law and order.” Antipathy to school integration was disguised as a rejection of “forced busing,” and hostility to using affirmative action, to provide Black and Latinx people access to colleges and public sector unions from which they had historically been excluded, was disguised as a concern for “fundamental fairness.” It takes a particular kind of malevolent brilliance to recast the victims of centuries of racialized oppression and legally sanctioned exclusion from the political and economic life of this country as undeserving freeloaders, but here we are.
The only thing that has kept virulent racism in check over the last 50 years has been the law. What we’re witnessing now is America without the guard rails of a truly non partisan Supreme Court or the preclearance requirements of The Voting Rights Act. Brian Kemp’s brazen voter suppression in Georgia comes as no surprise. The obdurate resistance to equality for all Americans has been disappointingly indestructible. Donald Trump is merely the avatar of the know-nothing nihilism at the core of that resistance. We need to face the fact that the seeds of this nation’s destruction were sown at the very beginning. We are only just now reaping their bitter harvest.
#VOTESAVEAMERICA
#MARCH
#STRIKE