"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."
Some say World War Three has begun. Not so. It could become world war three, but we’re in a new kind of war. The Gray War. Like the Cold War, but weirder.
The world wars were fought for territory. Territory is still important as a goal, but less important as a field of battle. In the Gray War don’t need to “win territory” to win the important fights. In fact, if you play your cards right in the front line battle fields of today, the territory comes relatively easily.
The front line battle fields should be no surprise to anyone. They are the connected (ie. networked) spaces of cyberspace, financial and credit markets, and public media / perception and emotion. These are intertwined in uncountable ways.
You will notice that lately we (America) have been beset by some crazy disruptions in the “public perception and emotion” field. Some of this is organic to our own historical & economic cycle, but a great deal of the “crazy” is being pushed in from without. The “pizzagate” craziness turns into the QAnon phenomenon, is that organic? Now the “Stop the Steal” conspiracy has turned into a movement that carries 30-40% of the electorate with it. Is that an accident? Nope. Can you pin down how much is “organic” and how much isn’t? Nope.
America has weak defenses against bad actors in the public space, even if they are outside our borders and are engaged in a war we don’t yet realize we are in.
As an open society, with (more or less) free speech, we are open to invasion by the agents, amplifiers and robotic minions of misinformation, fear, and rage. If you were Xi or Putin, and your agents (and their bots) had unfettered access to our markets, our open social networks, our media influencers… wouldn’t you maximize their impact in any way you could?
There is an organic “pro gun rights” movement in America, which should be negotiated with as such. But there is also a foreign influence campaign out to maximize the conflict on both sides of that issue. Ramping up the emotion of the extremes inside America is the goal, and our profit driven companies have openly and willingly provided the tools. Exploiting these weaknesses was a smart play, and we were naïve to be so blind to it, and have been slow to deal with it. Our “cancel mobs”… the twitter lefties who want to end careers of people who aren’t sufficiently woke? How much of that is organic, and how much of that is deliberately and carefully cultivated by foreign and bad faith actors? We will never know for sure, of course. But here’s what I do know. If I were Putin, or Xi, and I wanted to weaken America… what better way is there? It’s cheap, it’s easy, and you only need one idiot saying stupid shit to piss off or radicalize ten more. Partisan rage is a virus that spreads explosively. There’s no vaccine for it.
Decades ago, Bush/Cheney set us into “the 9/11 wars” which were disastrously expensive and destructive and won us nothing but pain death and debt. Then toward the end of Bush’s second term, with wealth inequality already massive and middle class incomes stagnant, the sub prime debt bubble popped. The financial collapse of 08 and the Obama election kicked off an even more extreme cycle of government spending, asset reflation, income inequality and an explosion of populism on left and right as people on all sides lost trust in the institutions that ran things. From that shit swamp, we got Trump.
That really could have been the end of us.
Trump was fresh. Charismatic. Wild. Unpredictable. Great TV. But Trump was such a BAD LEADER, such a bad organizer, such a chaotic lying narcissist that his power base is strictly this (admittedly massive) cult of personality in the GOP rank and file. It wasn’t enough. America voted him out, barely, before he could actually go full Putin on us. And in the brief Biden induced calm after Trump’s manic exit, Putin has done us the ultimate favor and invaded Ukraine, and Ukraine did what no one expected… fought back heroically.
It has reframed everything.
Suddenly there’s a real hero out there, and a real villain. Suddenly all the idiots who were praising Putin’s strength for years on Fox News, and all the jackasses who thought having to wear masks in big box stores was “tyranny” are looking like a very loud, drunk date you’re waking up with after a night you kind of can’t remember. You just want him to leave.
Suddenly the reason we liked the so called ‘rules based order’ is really clear. Suddenly Nato looks like we need it. And things like facts, and truth don’t look like bullshit. The lack of it seems key to understanding the Russian failure. It’s also what Ukrainians are dying for while we bitch about the price of gas.