The mass media are conjuring up once again a sinister Russian attempt to “interfere” in our “democratic election,” presumably to aid the allegedly Hitler-like Donald Trump. This familiar narrative is coming simultaneously from network news and the national press. 

The American internet, we’re told, is awash in Russian money, as Vladimir Putin is proceeding to buy the presidential race for his would-be fellow-dictator Donald Trump. Attorney General Merrick Garland and his alter ego, FBI Director Christopher Wray, were driven by this alleged danger to hold a press conference where they charged meddling Russian agents with corrupting our electoral process. 

Although nothing more than a few websites can be shown to have received Russian money either directly or indirectly, our political-media class is running enthusiastically with Garland’s accusation. Putin explained the obvious in a mocking tone: if he had to vote for an American presidential candidate, then he would be “a white dude for Harris.”

That choice makes sense, seeing that the Russian empire has picked up former Soviet territory in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine during the last two Democratic presidencies. Why shouldn’t the Russian leader be cheering for the less competent and flightier of our two presidential candidates? That’s the one who will continue Biden’s program of making the military more feminine and more woke while helping young men “transition” into girls. 

One might ask (and many Trump supporters have) why the Democrats are moving again toward charging Trump and his campaign with being in league with Putin. All previous attempts to raise such charges have turned out to be false. The FBI surveilled Trump’s campaign in 2016 on the basis of the phony Steele dossier, which was commissioned by the Democratic Party to gin up the Russian collusion narrative. They hampered his first administration with a congressional and special counsel investigation of Trump’s supposed involvement with the Russian government. And they enlisted members of the surveillance community to misrepresent Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop as a Russian trick in order to bury a story damaging to Joe Biden’s campaign in the 2020 election. Since they’ve benefitted so much from crying “Russia, Russia, Russia,” and have suffered no consequences, they have decided to trot out the same stories one more time. 

There are good reasons for this. One, Democratic hegemons are providing themselves with an excuse for failure if they lose the presidential race. It would not be American voters, they would say, who rejected them. The Democrats could present themselves as the victims of a fraudulent election and therefore justified in rejecting the official results. Please note that election denial is only a wicked act when it is done by Republicans. Hillary Clinton, Hakeem Jeffries, Stacey Abrams, Jamie Raskin, and other Democratic celebrities have all denied electoral results that didn’t please them, and the media obligingly rushed to defend their charges. 

Two, focusing media attention on Russian “meddling” in the November election diverts attention from the obvious fact that Democrats are awash in Chinese government money. The recipients of these funds include, among many others the Biden family, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, and staff members attached to prominent Democratic politicians. Among those harboring Chinese spies have been former California Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein and New York governor Kathy Hochul. One mouthy leftist Democratic congressman, Eric Swalwell, even had an affair with a Chinese spy and did so without losing his position on the Foreign Relations Committee.

National Review senior writer Dan McLaughlin has observed that of all forms of foreign interference, 

the Chinese influence operation ought to worry us the most. China is bigger, richer, and more sophisticated than Russia, Iran or the others. It’s our chief geopolitical rival—and the senior partner in its alliance with Russia and Iran.

Democratic operators and their media lackeys are diverting attention from their own corrupt practices by accusing their opponents of profiting from “Russian meddling.” That’s become particularly timely as the money laundering activities of the Biden family have captured public attention, despite longtime media efforts to suppress that story. 

Three, the revival of the charge that Trump and the Republicans are somehow colluding with the Russians provides what French sociologist and Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul ironically called a “fait politique (“political fact.”) It is, in other words, a manufactured version of reality created by political technician—those whom Ellul characterizes as suppliers of propagandistic information. These operatives provide their employers with the images and slogans needed to maintain the desired picture of reality. 

While there are differing “political facts” for different parties and factions, the most powerful distributors of propaganda are those who control the state and its sprawling administrative apparatus. The state’s manufactured facts, according to Ellul, trump all other manufactured truths in pervasiveness and influence.

Moreover, some of the invented realities that the ruling class features hold their followers together in ideological solidarity. Thus, no matter what new information surfaces that challenges the old “political facts,” once established, the old storylines continue to resonate with partisan listeners. 

Significantly, those who take advantage of this invented reality are also limited by their own narratives. Partisan propagandists are never willing to explain that what they once presented as truth was really false. They are impelled to repeat narratives that have been factually discredited because true believers want to hear them. In a sense, those who wield political power are “restricted by their own images,” Ellul wrote.

This may well apply to the continued attempt on sparse evidence to link Trump and his presidential campaigns to the Russian government. Although none of these accounts has been validated, the Democratic faithful yearn to hear the old storylines repeated. They are truly music to some listeners, who loathe equally the former president and the “right-wing” Russian nationalist head of state.

Both leaders are viewed by their media enemies as usurpers and fascists, who are eager to abolish “democracy” (which means, for the left, woke thought-control). These two villains, I’ve been hearing, must be working together to build anew something like the Third Reich. Among my Democratic acquaintances and certainly among legacy media personalities, such speculation remains popular. Therefore, I see no way that Merrick Garland and his associates can hurt their reputation among partisan Democrats by playing this golden oldie.