There’s No McCarthyism Like Liberal McCarthyism
Democrats’ misguided obsession with the Kremlin is distorting American politics and damaging legitimate counterintelligence work
As recently as 2015, there was no worse sin (except possibly racism) that a liberal could accuse anyone of than McCarthyism. In the early years of the Cold War, Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) went on a high-volume personal crusade to rid America of Red spies, creating the impression that Kremlin operatives lurked everywhere. McCarthy was a boozy charlatan who knew nothing about counterintelligence (in particular, he had no clue that VENONA existed) therefore his accusations were correct in the big picture – there really was a vast Soviet spy apparatus in the United States as across the West – and usually wrong in the details. Often painfully wrong. Tailgunner Joe devolved into a sordid spectacle, tarring legitimate counterintelligence work with the stain of partisan extremism. McCarthy couldn’t have given the Kremlin a bigger gift if he’d tried.
Therefore, for over 60 years after McCarthy was publicly condemned by his Senate colleagues who grew tired of his self-styled spy-hunting antics, McCarthyism was considered an unpardonable sin by any self-respecting liberal. Indeed, the Tailgunner Joe experience made liberals wary of discussing counterintelligence at all, and American popular culture for decades considered spy-hunting to be risible when not merely sinister.
Then, on June 16, 2015, Donald J. Trump came down that golden escalator at Trump Tower Manhattan, dramatically throwing his hat in the Republican presidential race, upending American politics and changing the country. This set off media mania about Trump’s reputed ties to Russia, and perhaps to its intelligence services. This was a perfectly legitimate question (I’ve answered it in counterintelligence detail here) but to grasp the issue you needed to have in-depth understanding of Russia’s “special services” and their modus operandi, which disqualified 99.999 percent of the pundits and Twitter Experts who pontificated on this subject for years.
Having no idea what you’re talking about, however, is a feature not a bug in our media these days. Social media and cable TV pundits don’t do nuance. Advocating an informed view doesn’t get clicks, while shouting third-hand clichés derived from “Resistance” personalities on Twitter does. Bona fide experts, this author included, who pointed out way back in 2017 that the infamous Steele Dossier reeked of classic Russian disinformation, got a lot less attention than media obsessives who treated its claims as holy writ.
This hothouse atmosphere, which itself amounted to a vast disinformation scheme, conditioned liberals to imagine a secret Russian hand lurking everywhere. The GOP isn’t passing the bills in Congress you want? That’s Moscow. Asking questions about Hillary’s emails? That’s Moscow. Wanting to know what’s on Hunter Biden’s laptop? That’s – you guessed it – Moscow! Everything I don’t like is the Kremlin became a mind-virus, one which has infected many liberal brains in a manner which Joe McCarthy would have envied.
Even in the rarified world of counterpropaganda, which I’ve been working in since the last century, liberals conflated narratives that were authored by Russian intelligence – for instance, “Hillary’s death squad assassinated Seth Rich” (which I exposed at the time) – with themes that are sometimes pushed by Moscow, yet not created there. Vladimir Putin and his regime don’t really care about American politics, they merely want to make us hate each other more than we already do. Hence, Kremlin propagandists pushing far-Right themes like white nationalism automatically discredits such things in elite circles, while Moscow amplifying Black Lives Matter (as Kremlin outlets have done at times) doesn’t raise any questions at all in liberal minds.
Liberals until recently were so uninterested in Russian disinformation that the Obama White House in early November 2015, exactly one year before Kremlin online trolls helped defeat Hillary Clinton, shut down the only office in the entire U.S. Government devoted to countering Russian disinformation (as I reported at the time). Since then, combating disinformation mysteriously has become central to the elite liberal worldview, except most of the time what they mean by this is “discrediting ideas we don’t like.” Counterpropaganda work has become politicized, with the dreadful impact that the half of the country which habitually votes Republican now laughs off it off as a merely partisan exercise.
This is bad news for our national security, but the good news is that the Intelligence Community is less politicized and still takes counterintelligence seriously. Indeed, top IC officials have been trying to get media attention on this, but the difficult truth is that liberals want to obsess about Russia, when China represents a bigger espionage threat to the United States. FBI Director Chris Wray, who has repeatedly attempted to raise the alarm about Beijing’s efforts to steal American secrets, recently warned about this in unusually forthright language:
“When we tally up what we see in our investigations—over 2,000 of which are focused on the Chinese government trying to steal our information or technology—there is just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, our innovation, and our economic security than China,” Wray said, adding that the Bureau opens a new counterintelligence case against China about twice a day.
The IC is also more deliberative about the Russian espionage and subversion threat than the mainstream media is. Today, Yahoo News published a brief report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence about a topic that’s been the subject of liberal nightmares for several years, namely Kremlin support for white Rightist extremists and nationalists abroad. The unclassified assessment dates to last July and bears the wordy title of “Russian Federation Support of Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists.” If you’re obsessed with the notion that Russian intelligence secretly backs the kook-Right in the West, making it a serious fascist threat to democracy, this ODNI report is for you.
However, I must warn the reader: You’re not going to like it. Let’s go straight to the executive summary and its conclusions on the Kremlin-backed RMVE problem:
The Russian Government probably tolerates some private Russian entities’ support to RMVEs, at least in art because it aligns with Kremlin efforts to aggravate societal fissures in the West. Russia sometimes uses and manipulates Russian ultranationalist groups at home, but does not welcome their influence and often subjects their leaders to harsh prison sentences. Some Russian private paramilitary groups are trying to recruit and train Western RMVEs to expand their reach into the West, increase membership, and raise money. The groups’ training of RMVEs poses a potential threat to Western security by encouraging and enabling attacks on ethnic minorities and government facilities.
We lack indications of Russian Government direct support – such as financing, material support, training, or guidance – to RMVEs outside Russia. However, Russian online influence operations amplify politically divisive issues that probably contribute to RMVE radicalization and recruitment efforts worldwide.
Translated from spookese into normal English: Putin’s Kremlin isn’t the hidden hand behind the kook-Right in the United States and the West, although Moscow’s propaganda themes probably boost their cause indirectly. This, of course, is the unclassified take and we should assume that a classified IC analysis of this matter would provide more details, yet neither would it have significantly different conclusions. Moreover, this is Joe Biden’s IC, which we can presume would be eager to amplify intelligence that might discredit the far-Right with Kremlin links, especially after the January 6th Capitol Hill riot-cum-insurrection, but there isn’t any.
The relationship of the Kremlin and its intelligence agencies with Western RMVEs can be summarized thus: Moscow considers the kook-Right a potential weapon to employ against the West, but it keeps some distance, mostly due to the domestic risks. The Russian Federation has a lot of non-Russian minorities and Putinism is a traditionalist conservative regime possessing scant tolerance for radical ethno-nationalism. Indeed, Russia’s equivalents of David Duke are well known to the Federal Security Service and are frequently incarcerated. It suits the Kremlin that their own White Power types are eager to fight abroad, in Syria and Ukraine, with “help” from the FSB and GRU, thus exporting the problem elsewhere. There is no RMVE International being run out of Moscow, as the IC has confirmed.
The ODNI report lists a few RMVE organizations possessing Russian links, including the paramilitary Rusich Reconnaissance and Sabotage Group (which is currently active in Ukraine, as Top Secret Umbra recently reported), the quixotic Russian Imperial Movement (which has connections to far-Right outfits in the West and was designated a terrorist group by the U.S. Department of State in April 2020), plus the shadowy neo-Nazi group which calls itself “The Base.” The last, which has affiliates in several Western countries, is more interesting than the IC lets on at the unclassified level, since that group, which names itself after Al-Qa’ida in a bizarre joke, is being led out of Russia by a tenebrous American who goes by several aliases yet whose true name is Rinaldo Nazzaro. He has a Russian wife and for many years did various work for U.S. Government agencies, including the Pentagon. As recently as 2019, two years after he moved to Russia, one of Nazzaro’s companies possessed a CAGE code. CAGE is short for Commercial and Government Entity, which is assigned to defense contractors by the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency. Getting a CAGE code is a cumbersome process requiring vetting by the Department of Defense. If you don’t have questions about what’s going on with Rinaldo Nazzaro, you should.
Regardless, the notion that Moscow represents the hidden hand behind the Western far-Right may be overblown but it merits attention, as illustrated by the strange case of Charles Bausman, the American white nationalist and Kremlin apologist (he, too, has a Russian wife: a common pattern in these extremist circles) who left his Pennsylvania home to participate in the January 6th protests in Washington, infiltrated the Capitol that fateful day, then promptly fled to Russia. From Russia, Bausman has appeared in the media to denounce the United States with far-Right invective. While there’s no unclassified evidence of Bausman’s connections to the Russian state, we should assume that he would not be welcome there without the FSB’s approval.
That said, it appears that the Kremlin has grown more cautious, not less, about official links to Western far-Rightists. Back in late 2016, as I reported at the time, an elderly Hungarian neo-Nazi named István Győrkös shot a police officer to death, causing bad optics for the extreme Right in that country. Worse, Győrkös turned out to be well known to GRU, that is Russian military intelligence, and Russian operatives had participated in combat training on the old man’s property. Since that incident, Moscow seems to have grown reticent about its spies possessing overt relationships with neo-Nazis. The Kremlin instead outsources such connections through fronts and cut-outs.
Paradoxically, Western liberals have grown more obsessed with Kremlin links to the far-Right as Russian spies have pulled back on that front. Recent populist protests in Canada provide an interesting case study. Truckers occupying downtown Ottawa to protest vaccine mandates didn’t disperse quickly (indeed they seem to be spreading nationwide), to the dismay of the Liberal government and Canada’s chattering classes, who have sought to blame Americans for the disorder in Canada’s capital. Support for Canadian truckers by American conservatives is no myth, and while it’s understandable that Ottawa doesn’t like this, the flow of ideas and more across the border is hardly new. However, there’s more than a little hypocrisy here. In mid-2020, Canada was rocked by Black Lives Matter protests across the country, in all ten provinces and three territories (yes, there was a BLM protest in Nunavut, less than 200 miles from the Arctic Circle). BLM is of course an American political organization, indeed a rather shadowy one, and it gave support to protests in Canada (and many other countries), yet nobody in Canada seemed worried about “foreign influence” then.
When the American bogeyman failed to explain Canada’s trucker protests, some pointed a finger at – you knew this was coming – Russia! There’s no evidence for this claim, of course, but that hasn’t stopped media commentators from alleging that the Kremlin is the hidden hand behind the truckers. While it’s possible that Russia’s special services are playing a role in the “Freedom Convoy” – this wouldn’t be entirely surprising given the long history of Russian espionage in Ottawa – some evidence would help before anyone makes inflammatory accusations designed to discredit the protests with supposed connections to Vladimir Putin.
The customary double standards have been on display in Canada just like south of the border. A notable influencer on the trucker protests has been Randy Hillier, a longtime member of Ontario’s provincial parliament who sits as an independent since he was kicked out of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party in 2019 for being, well, a nut. Hillier espouses the customary populist Right opposition to vaccines and lockdowns and has been a vocal supporter of the truckers. Recently, Hillier appeared on RT, the Kremlin propaganda network, to explain the protests, then took to Twitter to compare Canada’s mainstream media unfavorably to Russia’s.
Such a bizarre statement received proper criticism, yet predictably Twitter detectives immediately deduced that Hillier was the Kremlin mole they’d been searching for. Ontario’s provincial parliament in fact has a recent history of counterintelligence problems. In 2015, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Ottawa’s domestic spy agency, warned the Ontario Liberals that one of their own, an MPP named Michael Chan, appeared to be a Chinese spy. A Chinese immigrant, Chan wasn’t just a member, he was a minister in the Liberal government at the time. In response to this disturbing information, the Ontario Liberals did…nothing. Chan protested his innocence, sued the newspaper that reported the story, amid the usual accusations of “racial profiling,” and kept his post until he retired from politics in 2018. CSIS never changed its mind about Chan.
Counterintelligence is a serious business. Protecting our secrets, our democracy and our economy from foreign espionage is a difficult and important job that ought to be insulated from partisan politics as much as possible. If you have more interest in partisan politics than countering espionage, you might want to keep quiet while the experts are talking. The ghost of Joe McCarthy still haunts Washington, and the reckless conduct of too many liberals in recent years demonstrates that Tailgunner Joe can come back at any time, in any flavor of partisan attire, to wreak havoc on American counterintelligence and national security.