Justin Burke, editor of the Soros-funded news operation EurasiaNet, has an interesting and important op-ed piece posted at EurasiaNet about the dire problem of the Kremlin's information war, and its sinister propaganda campaigns and implications for the increasing fascist and communist nature of its society. After giving a diagnosis of all the bad things Russia has been doing to close down media, NGOs, and scholarly experts critical of Putin's regime who offer alternative perspectives, Burke suggests the cure -- a counter-propaganda effort from the west in the Soros ideological mold.
To be sure, the word "diversity" is used here:
Given developments over the past few weeks, it’s clear that Putin is capable of taking Russian society to a very dark place. Not only Russia and Russians are imperiled by the Kremlin’s attempt to stop the free flow of information. The history of the 20th century shows that a society closed off to a variety of viewpoints is capable of committing great atrocities and causing global harm. Ensuring diversity when it comes to news sources is one of the best means of preventing any given state from going off the rails.
But an honest assessment of how Russia got to where it is today would have to include Soros' role in funding US think-tanks that failed to deliver any real critique of Putin; Soros' role in funding and sustaining the election and re-election of Obama and his "reset" plan for Russia; the funding of US NGOs (notably Human Rights Watch) that put more emphasis on soft-ball programs like "harm reduction" in the drug-user population in Russia instead of spotlighting hard-hitting issues like torture in prisons, and getting the lion's share of its attention for the year by its support of Snowden in the Sheremeytovo airport lounge; and numerous lost opportunities to challenge the Kremlin and instead taking the accomodationist route in government, academia, and the non-profit sector.
You can be absolutely sure Justin Burke's post is being clipped and emailed and tweeted intensively by an Obama Administration out of ideas of what to do about Putin *really*, and underlined by think-tanks looking for new ways to ask for more money from the same old Soros.
Oh, but don't call it "propaganda," make it "like the Jon Stewart show" (Justin's favourite show). The effort shouldn't even sound like propaganda, but should be humorous, as humour, as we all know from years of having this concept drummed into us at the Soros Foundations, is the best way to get rid of dictators. (Hey, remember that chicken named after Milosevic's wife who was set scratching in the public square by Otpor?)
Also on Justin Burke's to-do list:
o Don't use "cold war" broadcasters like VOA and RFE/RL because they are too outdated in their ideology and methods
o Have some completely separate and new entity take on this job.
o Just have one such entity
When a Soros executive makes a proposal like this, it might be just his own wishful thinking that he publishes in the hopes that higher-ups in OSI or Soros-funded think-tanks pick it up. But it also might signal that plans are in motion for the usual meetings and task-forces and coalitions dominated by Soros and the plan to use OPM -- "Other People's Money" as it is known affectionately inside the Foundation -- to achieve Soros goals. This includes jointly-funded or jointly-cooperative programs with the US State Department and other US-funded bodies.
I hope people will ponder the diagnosis and the need for a response -- but not follow the Soros recipe. Because it's a killer, and always has been.
What follows is one of my long posts, and people complain about those. OK, then skim, or don't read it, read Justin's post, and write your own response -- which is sorely needed. Don't be afraid. Start an anonymous blog if you want or make a critical tweet -- but don't let this version of reality prevail unchallenged.
So:
First, some background. For much of my adult life -- but certainly no more -- I either was funded by, or worked directly for, various Soros entities - the Soros-funded Cultural Initiative in Moscow; the International Science Foundation; the East-East Program; the Open Society Foundation programs in Central Asia; and EurasiaNet. When I wasn't actually working inside the Soros behemoth, I was in NGOs that got a lot of their funding from Soros -- Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the International League for Human Rights, to mention some.
So I've watched the thinking of both George Soros personally and his many loyal lieutenants evolve and devolve personally, which I'll sum up as follows:
A decision to move from ensuring the pluralism and diversity of society -- the debate from many different perspectives -- by funding alternatives to officialdom and alternatives even to their preferred alternatives and the process of diverse debate itself - to funding just One Big Progressive Thing that they felt could Win. (The reason for this tactic was the belief -- largely false -- that the Fox News/GOP/Koch Brothers juggernaut was so big and powerful that only a monopoly could win.) This has been true in their programs abroad but is especially visible in domestic programs, all of which amounted to ensuring Obama's election, then his re-election, and then the slamming through of his agenda on various fronts -- millions in particular are given to funding alternative visions of national security and intelligence through everything from the Center for American Progress to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
A key feature of Open Society Institute (OSI) or the Soros Foundations -- sometimes delicately referred to as "the problem of a living donor -- is that a given Soros Foundation doesn't just give you a grant like the Ford Foundation or the MacArthur Foundation and tell you to come back in six months or 12 months and provide a narrative of your activities and financial reports; it wants to come along with you on the ride.
OSI -- in the words of one of its senior officials to me once -- is something like a graduate seminar -- the biggest, most well-funded, most travel-happy graduate seminar you could ever imagine. With one perspective. "Our point of view, with our people." The means by which this Consensus was arrived at daily on issues from ObamaCare to the bombing of Syria is opaque to me -- Open Society Foundation is least known for its openness and transparency about its own inner workings and decision-making. I think that Mort Halperin and John Podesta provide a lot of the theology but I'm not sure.
All funders want their grantees to be like-minded, broadly speaking, and want them to have an impact. Soros takes this factor far more aggressively than any other foundation (and I've worked for several) and pushes very hard to influence personnel placement, programs, and advocacy actions directly. So when Soros gets involved in something like funding an "entirely new entity" with "an entirely new approach" -- because an "information offensive is needed, one capable of competing with the Russian state media machine" -- you can be sure they will come along for the ride and be heavily present in its formation, operation, planning, and execution.
The notion that Justin (and others at OSI) have of such an "information offensive" already has some built-in flaws which doom it both to perpetuation of the Kremlin's intrigues and failure, namely:
o VOA and RFE/RL should be kept out. This animosity to the Congressionally-funded radios is completely and utterly misplaced. These stations are an asset, not a hindance to fighting the Kremlin because they actually have institutional memory and competent staff with language and culture ability. Now that the idiocy of Korn's firing of 40 people in Moscow and demolition of programs at the Russian service has been nearly all reversed, things are better. Of course there's lots more that could be done to shake loose the Obama-oriented paralysis and overly Kremlin-tropic line in the English-language sites, but that's fixable.
The Russian-language Svoboda has been doing an excellent job of using all the modern social media technology and new media methods to track in real time all the events in Russia and engage the audience. VOA covers topics that even the Western press intrepid enough to go to Sochi failed to cover adequately, like the persecution of the Circassian activists during the Olympics (they were arrested and tortured for demonstrating about the mass murder of their people under the Soviets). These radios should get even more funding, not less, as we enter this period of information war and needing to deter the Kremlin. They should turn into Internet TV stations that combat RT.com. They are best suited to do this. The "Cold War connections" of the "wrong" sort like the CIA funding have been gone for 35 years, even if a few old managers or broadcasters remain here and there; an entire new generation of savvy broadcasters has grown up in the post-Soviet period. It's ridiculous to sabotage this accomplishment, and instead it should be built upon.
o Counter-propaganda "shouldn’t be to prove the superiority of Western ways." Nonsense. Of course it should. And it's not "propaganda" - except in the eyes of radical anti-American Soros grantees -- to say so. Western ways *are* superior when it comes to basic things like the rule of law, judicial remedy, a free press, and a thriving civil society. Soros operatives and their grantees, more's the pity, often enter every transaction with the Kremlin or the other tyrants of the region with a chest-beating, mea-culpa, Obama-in-Cairo approach, favouring a moral equivalency between the two sides and thinking this helps alleviate tensions or ensure credibility. It never does.
Putin is cynical and not impressed if you also ran a program to stop torture in Guantanamo; he enables and justifies torture in his own country and selectively points to it abroad only as propaganda. Defusing his propaganda involves reporting on the reality of his system's torture and international law, not pretending to balance the saddle bags with American criticism. Whatever America's flaws, it still is the case that the vast majority of travel involving dissidents fleeing persecution is running from Russia to America, not in the reverse direction. Oh, except for the fugitive contractor Snowden and maybe a handful of Kremlin fellow-travellers.
o Burke says the purpose of the program should be to "merely provide Russians with a different point of reference that can help them think for themselves and make more informed decisions on how they wish to see their country develop." Well, no. Remember, the Soros Russian program's idea of a great innovative thinker is...Fyodor Lukyanov. Counter-propaganda is a relentless and aggressive contact sport, not a thumb-sucking. It requires constantly debunking and polemicizing and combating lies and showing them up in every venue. It's not merely laying out a ponderous publication with a different perspective -- it's fighting for what is true and right.I'm all for letting Russians think for themselves, obviously, and "amplifying voices" (I hate that word "empowerment") but let's not forget that it's Russians thinking for themselves that got us all Putin. The very people that Soros has been funding at home and in Russia for the last 20 years are some of the people that need to be challenged.
Soros pretends that it's for pluralism, but it actually has a very clear notion of what it thinks is right and true, and funds that to the exclusion of all us. And consistently in the last 15 years of Putin that line has been soft on Moscow and even enabling, as we shall see.
The result includes the following, which are all reasons which, in my view, make OSI unfit to take on the task of "a new information campaign" -- at least unfit to be the sole enterprise or lead agency in such an effort:
o EurasiaNet itself -- I've written at length about this on my Different Stans blog. While formally Russia isn't part of the set of countries to cover, again and again, EurasiaNet featured the columns of Hudson Institute's Richard Weitz who is decidedly part of the Realist school when it comes to Russia. Then it had Joshua Kucera preach against Russophobia -- as I wrote today, he was the one boosting Matlock's view of how to deal with Putin -- which involves rewriting history and accommodation. Given that Burke's star national security and defense correspondent Kuchera is so in the tank with Matlock and Putin, how could Soros credibly mount any kind of "information offensive" against the Kremlin? Seriously.
Time and again, I saw critical reporting about Russia simply edited away or discouraged -- I can remember vividly the time I quoted a Western ambassador in an article who said that Russia was indeed "a clear and present danger" -- and it was taken out as "extreme" -- even though it was absolutely on target, as the unfolding of recent events have proven. EurasiaNet was targeted by neo-con columnist Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post over its biased coverage of Russia and Georgia and the memoirs of Condoleeza Rice -- which of course only led to predictable red-meat reactions in the ranks of the Sorosites and even conservatives like Ariel Cohen. No matter. You don't have to be a neo-con to concede Rubin was right -- the bias is there. In part it is predicated on the default world-view of the EurasiaNet operation, which is the United States is the root of all evil, the Northern Distribution Network is the instrument of the American devil propping up evil regimes in Central Asia, and Russia is a minor, weak power that really doesn't pose a threat.
Guess that's why Russia has bases and troops in these countries and we don't anymore. Hello!
o Global Voices. This is an ongoing awfulness that none of us have really taken the time to debunk and systematically advocate about, although we should. A cursory read of the Twitter timeline of the Russian editor, Kevin Rothrock, should show you the problem -- and of course reading the entries themeslves on GV.
Kevin has turned in disgraceful things like a take-down on Navalny's alleged foreign property/funding -- which turned out to be an FSB frame-up. He even defended Russian TV's use of file footage to cover up that circles oopsy during the Olympics -- and then later deleted his tweet in shame. I remember the day of the Moscow mayoral elections -- Rothrock was tweeting cynically that people should buy matches and salt. He had the bad faith to savage Navalny when the man was on trial (the nature of Navalny, which we can all agree is troubling, to say the least, is not the issue when political trial methods are used.) There's lots of this awful stuff -- just look. Here's a disgraceful take-down of brave journalists and my response.
But it's not really just about Rothrock, as GV was horrible even before him -- imagine, the largest, most mass demonstrations in 20 years in 2011-2012, the "white ribbon movement," and GV isn't there. It is missing in action. It lets an intern in America occasionally update a generally outdated blog -- and never finds a way of excerpting and covering the rich and varied Russian blogosphere itself. Then Rothrock is brought in after his years of intensive Kremlinophilia blogging.
The problem starts with the conception of Global Voices, however, which isn't really one that sees the post-Soviet part of the world as any real problem. The orientation of the founders was decidedly leftist and "progressive," and they tended to do things like dismiss the effect of Twitter on Moldovans opposing Communists for that reason. Global Voice's founder Ethan Zuckerman is on the board of the Soros new media program, and so this is a built-in perspective that Soros likes and it won't go away. He isn't beyond reason and debate, I've found, but he represents a tendency that is never going to diverge from the Soros Line and create the kind of real, hard debate and challenge that is needed for Moscow.
(BTW, I should say here that it was the ancient idea of Aryeh Neier, formerly the head of the ACLU and then Human Rights Watch and then for many years president of the Soros Fondation, that the way to counter the Soviet propaganda the best was to combine criticism of Moscow with liberal critiques of the West that were "balanced" and would therefore be more persuasive ostensibly to these *cough* progressives in Moscow who would see the error of their ways once you reassured them that you were equally critical of the West -- which was equally bad. Ideally, the forces that should deliver the human rights message to Moscow should come from Europe, not the Evil Empire America, or if it must, only the most approved progressives in concert with European liberals. That this approach never really worked, and also collapsed (RIP International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights), was never admitted.)
Technically, Ethan Zuckerman and the Berkman Center do not directly control Global Voices any more, which was set free, to live on the Soros money that Ethan still affects from his position on the board, and other sources. But the reality is, the Russian section of Global Voices is appalling, and Soros has been content to leave it that way. Again: anyone who is thoughtful and sincere and properly critical of Russia's actions on the world stage and at home should instantly see the problem just by reading the back issues and studying the time-line of Kevin Rothrock, a long-time pro-Kremlin blogger and avowed admirer of Putin and RealPolitik who at times achieves grotesquery in his apologia for the Kremlin.
o Some might think that the Rothrock problem at Global Voices is just inattentiveness on the part of Soros management -- it's not. It is endorsed by Leondard Benardo, the program officer responsible for Russia (and Ukraine, and Belarus and the Baltics) who lets you know his sympathies on things like endorsement and funding of an ill-advised civil society meeting with Putin during the Putin-Obama summit in 2009 (which I opposed, because the reset was ill-advised and certainly didn't need to involve NGOs getting co-opted by Putin).
There there are the little things like this applause for the Soviet system -- at a time when Putin is busy re-annexing the Crimea! -- "say what you will, but the Soviets were, at least in a few respects, on the right side of history."
No, they weren't.
I apologize that this will take awhile to explain if you didn't instantly get the problem. It's as if a science program is "progressive" because it educated peasants after they were mass-murdered and collectivized -- despite building the bomb for Beria and Stalin (where the bomb-builders taught was at Simferopol) -- even if Sakharov was in it (although he at least opposed above-ground testing and suppression of intellectual freedom!) and enabling Soviet terror and oppression.
And it's as if a fake Soviet "friendshp of nations" policy illustrated in this "gorgeous mosaic" photo posted with such admiration by Shaun Walker of the Guardian could be something anybody with knowledge of the USSR and its punishment of peoples could ever endorse or take seriously. What was done to Crimean Tatars, Caucasians, Jews and others represented in that "rainbow" picture was an outrage. That today, Soviet science is in a shambles and Russia is busy turning the Academy into a bastion of state fascism -- despite George spending $200 million on it in part with my help -- ought to tell us something about communism and its late stages, mafia oligarchy.
Why should I have to explain this? Why are there still people in the world, nurtured in various socialist sectarian publications their whole lives, who can still hold up a picture of Soviet and foreign scientists and wax nostalgic for the Soviet Union? As if it really were this "progressive" thing where children were vaccinated even as their parents were put in the GULAG, or which put a man on the moon merely because of the intensive militarization of science all constitute "good things about it" which ransoms it from the Great Terror?
o Charter 97 - Despite the fact that Charter97.org is not only the most important independent news and alternative views website in Belarus, and among the most important in the region on a variety of regional issues, OSI program directors have outrageously blackballed Andrei Sannikov, its founder, and his colleagues. Sannikov is the former deputy prime minister responsible for the arms programs (who could tell you exactly where the bodies are buried on the 1994 agreement) who was also an alternative presidential candidate in 2010 and spent nearly two years being tortured in prisons before being released and forced to go into exile abroad.
There is absolutely no reason on earth why this vital and important media outlet and all its brave workers should ever have been blocked by Soros, but such is the might of this sprawling bureaucracy and vindictive operational agency with more resources than many foreign embassies that this sort of awful thing can happen.
Sannikov and his colleagues are everywhere admired and greeted by the top leaders of Western and Eastern Europe; Sannikov has been invited to John McCain's ranch and over the years has met with all our top regional and national security officials, as well as those of many other countries. His long-time colleague, Nikolai Khalezin, a now world-famous theater director for the Belarus Free Theater befriended by luminaries like Tom Stoppard and Jude Law, is also -- outrageously -- blackballed by Soros.
I personally had the extraordinary experience of being invited -- and then awkwardly disinvited -- to speak on a platform at the PEN Club when Khalezin's group was going to be part of an evening to support Belarus after the crackdown. I found out later that Laborey had personally called the board of the PEN Center in New York to urge them not to do business with Khalezin because of his involvement in Charter 97 (!). Worlds fail. How this petty, vindictive insanity could be allowed to get some head is beyond me, but it's partly because there is no open society at Open Society. I've suggested the parties involved to try to file a complaint to the Soros ombudsman about this outrage, especially now that there is a new president of OSF, but the ombudsman is in Lithuania, which is under pressure from the Belarusian government, and is weak in any event -- and can't be expected to go up against the top officials of OSI who have bought into some petty emigre squabble beyond all sense and meaning.
Yes, Soros blackballs them due to the petty intrigues of their Paris office director, Annette Laborey, a personal friend of Neier's and beloved by some -- due to her very close long-time relationship with certain Polish groups around the Solidarity movement and subsequent figures in the Polish government (although not Sikorski and others in the current government).
Some character -- possibly Pawel Kazanecki, a destructive individual trusted by NED, Soros, Freedom House and others for running operations in Belarus despite alarming reports by grantees about his intrigues and lack of effectiveness -- put out the fatwah on Charter 97 because it was a rival to his preferred customer, the Belarusian Popular Front, and the preferred Polish recipe for these countries -- and the Polonia recipe -- which has to do with stressing national language and culture rather than universality and the path to Europe (sound familiar?) Here's the root of the problem: Sannikov and his colleagues speak Russian as well as Belarusian and have their site in both languages -- which of course gives it wider accessibility not only to Russian speakers in their own country but the entire region.
Charter97.org is the sort of organization that combines hard news reporting and opinion pieces with humour and satires -- and it is run today by the kind of young people who can speak in a language that reaches others, which is why they have such high traffic. It's exactly the sort of operation that should fit this "new entity" envisioned by Burke -- and yet it is banned in Soros-land. That isn't only bad judgement; that's unconscionable sabotage of good people who have been doing very risky work under terrible conditions.
o Samuel Charap -- for years Charap was at CAP, Soros' heavily-funded flagship think-tank -- so important that its leader John Podesta is now in the Obama Administration -- then the State Department, and now International Institute for Strategic Studies. Charap is emblematic of the International Relations Realist School and is known for opposing the Magnitsky List and supporting engagement with Putin. If there was just some of these kinds of scholars and there was a variety of viewspoints, it wouldn't matter. The problem is that -- as always with things Soros -- the influence is outsized, the proximity to power intense, and the alternatives weak or non-existent.
o Evgeny Morozov -- Morozov is another beneficiary of Soros money -- a Soros fellow of which OSI is very proud. But he's also responsible for leading a jihad against the State Department's Internet freedom programs, and is now notorious for never criticizing Putin or Lukashenka (he's from Belarus) but only the West. He is known as an Internet cynic and Cassandra, but I don't think most people have looked past his needed corrective to Silicon Valley hype and utopianism to the decidedly Brezhnevian social vision he offers, replete with hating on "neoliberalism" and capitalism as a system -- funny how again, and again, Soros winds up using the money he himself obtained from capitalist ventures to fund a kind of socialism that isn't even third-way Blair socialism but ends up being so destructive of America and playing into Russia's hands (i.e. with support of every Snowden-related program and issue).
There are others -- Robert Wright, yet another Soros-funded writer, comes to mind. Again -- the problem isn't that all these organizations and think-tanks and public intellectuals exist on the monolithic Soros dime, and the answer isn't to defund them - the problem is that there is no alternative. There's no debate. There's no criticism. And that is not how you tackle the problem of the Kremlin's monism. Worse, these are the very people who have been essentially enabling Putin in the US and Europe in the extensive networks of think-tanks and NGOs and political parties that Soros influences.
There's many more examples I could cite -- don't get me started on the $100 million grant to Human Rights Watch and the Moscow office of HRW and their programs -- but let me come to my own solution for what is needed to fight the information war properly with Russia:
o Pluralism, not monopoly by one funder or grouping. People will never agree on how to deal with Russia, and Russia exploits that and tries to ensure the weakest form will oppose it, if it must be conceded, so it's important to encourage diversity and not fight for the usual Soros model, which is coopting and killing competition and taking over. (That's what it did with Russia and Central Asia and the results are grim.) What makes the West strong isn't One Politically-Correct Progressivism as Soros now promotes; it's true pluralism of a variety of views. Russian emigres would often be the first to say that the West should stop being a pussy and gather up in one big fist to pound the Kremlin (Bukovsky was particularly scathing on Western fellow-travellers and limp leftists, and rightly so), but the reality is, modeling the true open society in practice is really much more important. What's needed isn't just exposure of the Kremlin's disinformation antics -- a big job all its own -- but challenging of the sort of ideologies you hear from Navalny and friends -- even while being protective of their human rights. Just as important as tackling the Kremlin directly is the polemicism at home -- and that means being able to argue without fear against all these Soros creations at home extensively because they've been all wrong about Russia and what works to stop it.
o Hard, factual -- and adversarial -- reporting as the center of gravity. I'm particularly proud of The Interpreter, where I work as a translator and news writer, which I think has been at the head of the pack on the anti-disinformation campaign on Russia's appalling propaganda accompanying its invasion of Ukraine. I don't think this is mere bias; I think it's a fact that the traffic and citations will bear out.
But as much as I want to see my group thrive and grow, I think the solution to the bigness and power of Russia is that networks of different organizations have to exist, not just one big operation of the Soros/Human Rights Watch/$100 million model (which killed off other lesser organizations or made them redundant or their lives miserable as they sought to find alternative funding). I think it's especially important that "pluralism" doesn't amount to a dozen operations funded and essentially directed hand-in-glove by Soros operatives, but true diversity with multiple distinct funding sources in both government and private sectors in the US and Canada, the European Union, and elsewhere.
o News operations inside the country -- as much as everyone fears the "foreign agent" law in Russia and the wariness of Russians themselves now to taking foreign grants formally, there still has to be ways of funding news flow in Russia itself. And this can be done indirectly by funding travel and study abroad for some journalists and bloggers and equipment purchases abroad in the way Soros and other funders have had to do it since being kicked out of Russia -- and the way Soros and all foundations had to function in the Soviet period. This is way more important than opening up a "Russian information" department in CAP or NAF or some other Soros think-tank.
o Support for samizdat/Internet proxy and circumvention efforts inside Russia -- this should be contingent on what people ask for and need, and can't be a replacement for them organizing their own small businesses and donors and volunteers inside the country, which is what is required to really succeed against oppression anywhere. But they do need solidarity and help from outside, and that has to be supplied. Every operation needs mirror servers and circumvention equipment and software and alternative routes of physical travel; many more emigre operations have to be set up with sustained Internet presences and they cannot be treated like Smiley's people, but have to be respected.
o The humor approach is already being tried within the country itself without any help from Soros, and outside by projects like Inostranniy Agent on Facebook. You don't need a big budget to make and send a meme.
o The John Stewart show is not the model Burke imagines. What does Jon Stewart's humour actually consist of? It consists of doing intensive, aggressive, cunning, even malicious oppo research on Fox News and conservative groups that Jon hates, like Sarah Palin or Ted Cruz.
It consists of endlessly pilloring and skewing and playing "gotcha" with people that fall into Stewart's laser target. Occasionally, he might run a "serious" interview such as with the Russian writer Masha Gessen. But by and large, the Stewart formula is a more sophisticated version of the Saul Alinsky rules, which themselves are a condensed version of the Lenin playbook.
Freeze and debilitate your target. Find something that seems to run directly counter to its supposed good reputation or notability, and emphasize the contradiction. Play gotcha with cherry-picked moments and high-contrast points without context. It's actually this mean-spiritedness and cunning that make Stewart not funny for me even though -- um, no, I don't watch Fox News (I don't have a TV), and I don't care for Ted Cruz or Glenn Beck. Colbert is more subtle in that respect, but ultimately he is a "progressive" political project as well. I have no doubt that both of them will make it their business to harry and harass Hillary Clinton if she runs, and favour Elizabeth Warren, and then we'll see how starkly political these two can get.
What I'm telling you in long-form is essentially this: propaganda doesn't work. What Soros produces is merely progressive propaganda that is music to some people's ears, but it is propaganda nonetheless.
The key to undoing lies is to tell truths, not jokes. And because the paths to truth are multiple, that means enabling diversity.
If somebody tells a funny anecdote and spreads a funny Demotivator poster along the way, great, but I don't think we're winning any hearts or influencing minds by all the canned posts about Putler and contrasting pictures of the pathetic red-clad Kurganyanites -- who numbered 10,000 only and are widely challenged -- with the Nazis invading Poland. The tweets that showed the horribly biased billboard advertisements from the Crimea and the already-checked ballots do a lot more to tell the story and convince people than photoshopped mash-ups of Putler as the North Korean leader or Putin on top screwing Yanukovych on bottom.
Honestly guys, it's not a joke -- it's war.
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