Why aren’t conservatives up in arms that a think tank staffed with veterans of the U.S. security state and others spent years deliberately perpetrating a fraud?
I think the cumulative effect of the Twitter Files and the exposure of Hamilton 68 as a top-to-bottom fraud should provoke a massive reaction on the American right, yet I haven’t observed it.
The total of the revelations is that a significant portion of our intelligence community spends its time monitoring, supervising, and intervening in Americans’ political thoughts and deliberations. When members of the “intel community” leave government work, they either work for Silicon Valley or these progressive NGOs.
Hamilton 68 was the product of the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), an anti-disinformation project launched by the German Marshall Fund. The German Marshall Fund is a think tank funded by several governments: the United States, Switzerland, and Germany among them. Although it’s partly infamous as the political training ground of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the German Marshall Fund is as establishment as it comes. It welcomes center-left and center-right voices and aims to foster a consensus among policy intellectuals across Europe and America. The fund helped to secure the philanthropic donations that run the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which was governed by a board that included Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security under George W. Bush; Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama; Bill Kristol, former editor of the Weekly Standard; Hillary for America chair John Podesta; and, at one time, Jake Sullivan, now national-security adviser to President Biden.
Hamilton 68 claimed to be monitoring hundreds of Russian bot accounts across Twitter. Forensic analysis later revealed only 34 were registered in Russia, most of them to the Russian state media outlet RT. The list of accounts Hamilton 68 used to generate hundreds of stories across the media mainly included real American people sharing their authentic political opinions. Twitter’s Trust and Safety operation quickly discovered the list was a scam. They included conservative firebrand David Horowitz as a Russian bot. Many accounts had substantial but not massive followings, like @cordliers, an Oregonian man with just over 10,000 followers.
I don’t know about you, but I was taught that even if Joseph McCarthy believed his list of subversives, the Red Scares of the 1950s were shameful in themselves. Even if private actors created the Hollywood blacklist, the government’s intimidation tactics made it an outrage against a culture of free speech and free expression.
So why aren’t conservatives up in arms that a government-funded think tank launched a project staffed with decorated veterans of the American security state and then spent years deliberately perpetrating a fraud: framing up American citizens as Russian bots in an attempt to bully Silicon Valley to censor the speech of Americans — often random, if voluble, citizens that it didn’t like?
If this doesn’t get your blood pumping, then maybe we should all pack it in and concede that “Securing Democracy” means Bill Kristol, some overpaid spook consultants, and a handful of lying progressive think tanks get to run the world without input from the Americans they find so loathsome.