How to Build an Authoritarian System

With some help from 60 Minutes

Happy Friday! A reminder: Don’t miss out on my Foreign Influence Operations course. It’s timely and educational. And also fun! Class 6: Anatomy of a Russian Influence Operation will be posted Monday.

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ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT

Someone embroider this on a pillow for me, please.

The construction of an authoritarian system doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It takes a village.

First, it requires a ruling elite intent on serving its own interests over those they are meant to serve. Everyone in that ruling elite tends to scratch everyone else’s back, in order to stay part of that ruling elite. As such, it breeds a patronage system among those at the top. The result is a system that does nothing to serve the people and everything to serve the ruling class.

But it takes enablers to build such a system. Collaborators. Some may collaborate involuntarily (it may be the only way they can save their family, for example); but others may collaborate voluntarily, likely because they recognize some professional or economic self-interest. You could say, they insert themselves into that patronage system.

For an in-depth look at complicity and collaboration, I highly recommend this essay by Anne Applebaum. But one of the main points from her essay is this: “It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing value systems. The process usually begins slowly, with small changes.”

Enter 60 Minutes.

The esteemed news show did a bang-up job helping to persuade people to abandon their existing value systems by presenting Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ideas as legitimate in a democratic society.

I talk a lot in my Foreign Influence Operations course about “laundering narratives,” moving conspiracies and extreme ideas from the fringes into the main public square, where they seem more legitimate. It’s hard to think of a platform with more legitimacy than 60 Minutes (or it used to be, at least).

Leslie Stahl began the segment by presenting Greene as just a normal gal from Georgia. She called her “smart and fearless.” But in same breath, Stahl says Greene “has a history of believing in conspiracy theories.” It’s hard to reconcile those two descriptions.

Here’s one exchange from the interview (summarized by me):

Stahl: You once called the Parkland shooting a “false flag.”

MTG: No, I didn’t!

Stahl (with an impish grin): We fact checked it and you did [tweet appears on screen showing MTG did, in fact, call it a false flag]

And, scene.

Yep, that was it. Stahl—who had opened the interview by reading a list of names people have called Marge and qualifying those names as, “pretty ugly stuff”—provided no qualitative comment about how this very clear lie was “pretty ugly stuff.”

Nor did Stahl ask Greene about her claims that the 2020 election was stolen. 60 Minutes even ran a clip of Marge saying it was “blatant outright fraud, complete and outright fraud.” But Stahl never asked her about this lie.

Or how about when Stahl said Greene has embraced violence in the past, including calling for the execution of some Democrats and claiming that if she had been in charge of the January 6 insurrection they would have won and she and her supporters would have been armed.

To which Greene replied (I’m paraphrasing here, but not much): What about all those other times I didn’t call for Democrats to be executed or for the government to be overthrown? Why does the media never cover that?

Yes, why indeed? I am now imagining a 60 Minutes interview with Jeffrey Dahmer.

Stahl: People call you a serial killer. A brain eater. A cannibal. Pretty ugly stuff.

Dahmer: What about all those times I didn’t kill someone and eat them? Sometimes, I just had apple pie, like any normal human American. But no one ever talks about that.

[Stahl nods with an impish grin]

And now the news just dropped that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of luxury travel from a mega donor to the GOP. I now eagerly await Stahl’s interview with him.

Stahl: You were required by law to disclose those gifts.

Thomas: Check out this photo of me on a SeaBob off a superyacht in Indonesia!

Stahl (with an impish grin): People will call you a rebel, bucking the system.

Episodes like these are exactly the type of thing that slowly chips away at our value system, our democratic value system, and desensitizes us from just how fucked up it is to have political leaders who spew violence against their own government. Because in a democratic system, that’s pretty fucked up. And excusing it as “just rhetoric” or as someone just being a rabble rouser lowers the bar for what we should expect from our leaders.

Stahl ended her interview with Marge by asking the audience, “Can she expand her brash MTG brand beyond the right-wing populist base?” Well, Leslie, with your help, the answer just may be yes!

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THE WEEK’S LINKS

A roundup of stories you should be reading

(Note: I reserve the right to rant in depth about any of these at a future date)

RUSSIA

Russia confiscates passports of senior officials to stop defections (FT)

Panic and emotional pain as alleged deep-cover Russian spies vanish (The Guardian)

UKRAINE

Ukraine’s secret plan to convince 3 Russian pilots to defect with their planes (Yahoo!)

HUNGARY

‘They Tried to Frame Us’: New Assault on Hungarian Journalists Highlights Media Freedom Crisis in the Heart of Europe (OCCRP)

US SUPREME COURT

Clarence Thomas Secretly Accepted Luxury Trips From GOP Donor (ProPublica)

YOUR FEEL-GOOD STORY OF THE WEEK

Chinese firm invents lockdown-inspired kissing machine for remote lovers (Reuters)

Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?

Look at that beautiful smile! I look pretty happy, too.