From Russia, with money

For as long as it’s been in conflict with America and its democratic allies, Russia has tried to defeat them from within. It used any number of propaganda techniques over the decades to foment division, sow dissent, and undermine the consensus around democratic principles and ideals. And then, long after it looked like the cold war had been won by the West, social media came along and inadvertently handed Vladimir Putin his most powerful weapon yet.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s indictment of two employees of RT for covertly financing and directing a Tennessee-based online content creation company is just the latest example of how that weapon works. While neither the company nor the content creators it hired to do Russia’s work were named, the facts laid out in the indictment point toward Tenet Media and right-wing influencers like Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, and Canada’s own Lauren Southern. Indeed, the co-founders of Tenet Media, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, are both Canadians. 

Russia has long relied on so-called “useful idiots” to carry its ideological and political water, but these particular idiots belong in the useful idiocy hall of fame. Using the nearly $10 million provided by the Russians, Tenet paid the six influencers as much as $400,000 a month for their work, which involved producing content that focused on topics like inflation, immigration, and foreign policy. The goal, according to the indictment, was “amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine.”

So far, their defence has been either that they didn’t know who was behind the wildly excessive payments for their work or that — get this — they were actually the real victims here. It’s not clear yet whether any of them have returned the money they were victimized with, or if they even plan to. But as The Line’s Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney wrote on their Substack, ignorance isn’t much of a defence here. “What this suggests to us is either that many of these personalities have been groomed by Russian intelligence for years prior to the existence of Tenet; or that this funding scheme was consciously directed toward personalities whom Russian agents felt could be reliably swayed or influenced. This hardly absolves anyone, now does it?”

This underscores a pretty big weakness in our increasingly influencer-oriented intellectual ecosystem, one where people with no real background or training in journalism often command the largest audiences. It’s bad enough that we have a growing roster of propaganda-curious podcasters, YouTubers, and other social media entrepreneurs who seem more interested in feeding the algorithms with outrage and controversy than pursuing the truth. But with Twitter’s transformation from a digital public square into a clearinghouse for conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods, the dogs of digital warfare have truly been unleashed. 

That’s as true here in Canada as it is south of the border. We may not be Russia’s primary target, but we are still in its crosshairs. As former CSIS director Richard Fadden told the CBC, "The Russians' overarching objective is to increase the level of discontent in our institutions — and institutions in all of the Western countries. There is no rational reason that I can think of why Canada would be exempted."

Press Progress editor Luke Lebrun noted in a recent piece that the Russian-funded Tenet Media influence campaign yielded 50 videos on Canada, with the majority produced by — you guessed it — Lauren Southern, the Rebel Media alumnus who traveled to Russia in 2018 to meet with a neo-fascist philosopher and Putin ally named Alexander Dugin. Southern’s videos, unsurprisingly, focus on the very same red meat that feeds the rest of Canada’s far-right online ecosystem, from paranoia around “mass” immigration and trans rights to inflation, housing and the innumerable evils of Justin Trudeau. 

None of this is to suggest Southern or any of the right-wing Canadian influencers that appear in her videos (convoy enthusiast Katrina Panova and True North personality Harrison Faulkner) are knowingly taking cash from Russians to hold and share their views. It’s to suggest something potentially worse: that they never needed to be paid to hold and share them in the first place. As American Sunlight Project co-founder Nina Jankowicz told the New York Times, “they chose influencers who were already engaging in rage bait, exploiting the pre-existing fissures in our society for clicks.”

This indictment and the small handful of influencers it appears to implicate is almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg. RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonian, has said that her organization has built “an enormous network, an entire empire of covert projects,” all with the aim of influencing western audiences. There’s also a separate FBI affidavit unsealed last week that shows a sanctioned Russian company called Social Design Agency (SDA) has a list of 2,800 people who are active on social media in the U.S. and 80 other countries, one that includes “television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think-tank analysts, veterans, professors and comedians.”

It’s safe to assume that there are at least a few Canadians on that list. Some may even be familiar to us. So what can we do? First and foremost, we need to be absolutely clear about the fact that foreign interference isn’t just an issue when it comes to our elected officials. There are clearly efforts underway to influence the broader intellectual environment in which they operate, and the ongoing collapse of the mainstream media has created a void — and an opportunity — that the Russians and other state-level operators will happily exploit. 

Gerson and Gurney suggest this might be an opportunity for those on the right to take a harder look at the information they’re consuming and sharing. “We at The Line actually have some small hope that the indictment in full will prompt at least some soul searching among the conservative information ecosystem.” I am not nearly so optimistic. As we’ve seen time and again, people — conservatives, yes, but also progressives — default to the sources that tend to flatter their pre-existing biases and beliefs. We’re not naturally wired to seek out competing or conflicting sources of information, and we’re not being properly equipped to sort fact from fiction. 

The Russians, of course, know all this, and are using it to their advantage. What we need is a government that’s able to properly regulate social media companies in a way that maximizes the opportunities for free expression and minimizes the rewards associated with spreading conflict and division. Until then, we’re all just casualties in a digital war we never signed up to fight. 

Speaking of useful idiots

Alex Epstein, an American author and climate skeptic, has built a tidy business around making what he calls “the moral case for fossil fuels.” And while I’m usually reluctant to amplify his arguments, such as they are, he made one recently that serves as an example of how insidious fossil fuel propaganda can be — and why basic media literacy skills are so important right now. 

He pulls out a quote from 2004, ostensibly from The Guardian, that says “climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters." He contrasts it with a chart showing a decline in the number of climate-related deaths since the 1920s. In case his followers weren’t clear about what he was trying to say, he uses the hashtag #catastrophizing.

There are a bunch of problems here, none of which would be obvious if you took his statement at face value. First, it’s not some left-wing newspaper or one of its predictably progressive writers doing the #catastrophizing here. It’s actually them paraphrasing the contents of a report commissioned by Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall. Not exactly some woke leftist, in other words. 

(Ironically, the piece in question wasn’t even published in the Guardian at the time but instead The Observer, the Guardian’s sister paper that ran on Sundays)

Its authors, which include CIA consultant and former Royal Dutch Shell employee Peter Schwartz, argue that climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern.” Why? Because as co-author Doug Randall told the Observer, “there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat.” Their recommendations were even more shocking given the government they were reporting to. "The consequences for some nations of the climate change are unbelievable,” Randall said. “It seems obvious that cutting the use of fossil fuels would be worthwhile.’

That never happened, of course. But there’s another element of Epstein’s tweet that deserves a bit of quick unpacking. Yes, it’s possible that the massive decline in the number of climate-related disasters means we don’t have to worry about climate change, just as it’s possible that the number of movies starring Will Smith correlates with electricity generation in Kosovo. 

But as a handy Reuters fact check makes clear, this is a textbook case of drawing the wrong conclusion — deliberately, I’d say — from the data. “Although deaths from these disasters have decreased, due in part to better forecasting and preparedness, the number, intensity, and cost of climatic and meteorological hazards have all increased over the last hundred years.” Massive famines in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s are responsible for most of the climate-related deaths in that period, including ones in Ukraine and China. 

That we’ve gotten better at both forecasting and managing extreme weather events, and avoiding self-inflicted catastrophes like the famines in the Soviet Union and China, says nothing useful about the degree or nature of the threat climate change poses. What we know for certain is that the number and intensity of storms, heatwaves and other weather events continues to rise, and that the losses and damages they generate are increasing in lockstep. 

It would be nice if we didn’t have to constantly get sidetracked with these sorts of bad-faith arguments and deliberate red herrings. At the very least, we should all do our best to knock them down and move on to the real conversation at hand — and help others do the same. 

Seth Klein is (mostly) right

Speaking of that real conversation, my National Observer colleague Seth Klein gets into it in a recent column. I confess that I was prepared to bring some disagreements to the table, given my reflexive instinct towards moderation and Klein’s more ideologically strident outlook on things. It’s a disagreement we’ve had before, most notably in the debut episode of my former podcast Maxed Out. 

We’re not going to have that disagreement here, though. That’s because Klein’s piece makes some very compelling points about the need for the climate movement to shift gears, stop tinkering at the edges, and start winning some real political battles. 

“Incrementalism is no match for the crises we face,” he writes. “That’s not just true for climate, but for all the other elements of the polycrisis upon which the populist right feeds – the housing crisis, the poison drug epidemic, inequality. When we respond to these crises with half measures, we can never get ahead of the curve.”

I agree. If progressives are going to avoid a Poilievre majority government in the next election, they’re going to have to take some much bigger swings than they have to date. Things like the new dental care program are good and important and also represent a smallness of vision that will doom progressives to defeat if they can’t rise to the size of the moment. That’s especially true on climate. 

Klein rightly identifies the major political challenge on that front, which is a misalignment of the needs of today’s voters with the best interests of tomorrow’s. “The curse of the climate crisis is that it moves in slow motion (except, of course, when it expresses itself in violent extreme weather events, but never everywhere at once), inviting political leaders to kick the can down the road to a future mandate, and the public to prioritize more immediate challenges – housing, affordability, war, the many oppressions of now,” Klein writes. “Yet the solutions to the climate crisis require transformative solutions in the immediate term, and every year in which we fail to ramp down emissions comes at great cost.”

Check, check, check. 

If the Liberals or New Democrats are listening, and they should be, Klein’s piece includes a pretty compelling alternative to the carbon tax. He suggests that we need “billions of dollars more spent on transformative climate infrastructure that will employ tens of thousands of people,” pushes for free heat pumps and public transit, and proposes paying for some of that with wealth and windfall profits taxes. “These represent transformative policies that tackle multiple crises at once and bolster solidarity.”

I have absolutely no doubt that economists — those blessed, wonderful creatures — would be aghast at this sort of package of policies. It would be an economically inefficient way to reduce emissions compared to the carbon tax, after all. But it might also be politically effective and durable, and that matters far more in the end. 

I don’t agree with everything in the piece, of course. He suggests that people should consider acts of civil disobedience, which I tend to think are counterproductive on this particular file. Blocking traffic or interfering with the construction of some sort of infrastructure may feel good and righteous but it often has the effect, it seems to me, of alienating the very people climate activists need to win over. 

But that’s a pretty minor quibble. I broadly agree that those who care deeply about climate change have to find a new way to make their concerns more politically relevant, and that a Poilievre government would be a disaster on that front. If there was ever a time to push all your chips into the middle on this issue, it’s right now. 

Recommended Reading

In the New York Times, here’s David Wallace-Wells asking an important — and exciting — question: what will we do with our free power? The rapid rate at which solar energy is being deployed, and its costs are being reduced, means grids in the United States (and elsewhere) will soon have to contend with the prospect of ultra-cheap or even free energy. This opens any number of potentially interesting doors, from widespread decarbonization or desalination to the development of new industries. It’s a lens on climate change we’re not used to seeing: optimism. 

I readily confess that I have a deep vein of techno-optimism in me, one that was probably put there by many, many hours of watching Star Trek: The Next Generation as an impressionable kid. And yes, I’m well aware that the 21st century — and particularly the portion directly ahead of us — is a bit of a bleak period in that particular canon. Even so, this strikes me as a very attractive message for climate change advocates going forward: not one of deprivation or sacrifice or pain but instead one of plenty. 

Speaking of which, here’s an announcement from geothermal energy pioneer Fervo Energy about their latest milestone, one that puts it on track to achieve performance in line with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s “Advanced Technology” case more than a decade ahead of its 2035 target. 

And in case you haven’t had enough techno optimism yet, here’s a really cool video from Terraform Industries founder Casey Handmer that suggests solar could be used to generate synthetic (zero-emission) fuel — and displace large volumes of methane and other emitting natural gas. “I predict that by 2042, 95 per cent of humanity’s usage will be downstream of solar voltaic power.” 

I’m sure that seems wildly ambitious, and maybe more than a bit naive — or promotional. Then again, they said the same thing about the idea of phasing out coal-fired power in Great Britain. And yet, here we are. 

Finally, as a palate cleanser, here’s a long and fascinating feature in Bloomberg Businessweek by British Columbia’s own J.B. MacKinnon on the “brutal economics” of reaching net zero. Spoiler: it can be done, but it won’t be easy. 

That’s it for this week — the first week back for the newsletter. If you have suggestions, complaints, or even compliments, feel free to send them all my way at [email protected].