Are The Russians Boosting Trump?

Another U.S. presidential election, another raft of high-profile accusations about Russian interference to boost Donald Trump. The latest version, which we covered in brief yesterday, was the Department of Justice’s twin Wednesday indictments targeting alleged Russian disinformation schemes. The first involved charges against two Moscow-based employees of the Russian state-media company Russia Today for funneling nearly $10 million in investment to Tenet Media, a conservative startup founded by YouTuber Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan. Tenet employed several high-profile right-wing content creators, including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson, though the DOJ has claimed they were “duped” by Chen and were unaware of the Russians’ involvement. 

The second indictment involved the seizure of 32 websites, collectively referred to as “Doppleganger,” alleged to be part of a Russian online influence operation. These included both fake URLs designed to spoof mainstream news sites, such as “washingtonpost.pm” and “fox-news.in,” and original brands such as “Recent Reliable News.” As usual, the spoofed content was laughably fake. For instance, here’s a faux Washington Post headline from one of the Russian “cybersquatted” URLs:

And on Thursday, the DOJ indicted Dimitri Simes, the former publisher of The National Interest who played a minor role in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, for violating U.S. sanctions by working as a commentator on the Russian state-owned TV channel, Channel One Russia. (Simes’ work for Channel One was public knowledge, and he now lives in Russia, where he was born.) 

The subtext of these indictments, of course, is that there is a massive Russian effort to help elect Donald Trump, including by buying off right-wing media figures. For instance, here was the image that the Associated Press chose for its report on the Wednesday indictments:

But was Chen—according to the indictment, the only influencer at Tenet in contact with the Russians—actually a Trump booster? Here are some of her recent social media comments, all from late August, courtesy of Ashley St. Clair on X:

• Posting on X that she was “done” with Trump after the former president said in August that he would veto a nationwide abortion ban

• Declaring that “I’m out” of the “conservative movement” in response to a pro-Trump X post from Caitlyn Jenner

• Claiming that Trump had sold out his “Christian conservative base” to pander to the “Enriques and Jamals”

• Denouncing Trump for going “soft on immigration” and “crime,” “pandering to zionists,” and putting “Dems in his cabinet”

• Describing Trump’s alliance with former Democrats Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard as a victory for the “Uniparty”

Chen has also made a host of provocative comments, including that she opposes “democracy” and wants to repeal the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. And she has been particularly insistent in her opposition to “Zionist” influence over the Trump campaign and the Republican Party, regularly accusing American Jews of “dual loyalty” and alleging that evangelical support for Israel is a product of a “Zionist” project to “infiltrate American churches.” Amusingly, one of her last X posts before the indictment dropped was a retweet of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper, which we discussed in our Big Story yesterday. 

So, the centerpiece of the big “pro-Trump” Russian influence op was an agent provocateur who spent the last several weeks attacking the former president for not being racist, antisemitic, or pro-life enough to deserve the votes of his “Christian” base. Meanwhile, we have Chinese influence operations (the Singham network), Muslim Brotherhood and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine front groups, and Iranian influence efforts operating more or less openly in the United States, with no DOJ enforcement action in sight. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: In a brilliant new book, French sociologist Olivier Roy argues that globalization has annihilated “culture” only to replace it with “identity.” That’s probably wrong, Marc Weitzmann writes.

→Hamas’ execution of six Israeli hostages, including one U.S. citizen, has “called into question Hamas’ willingness to do a deal of any kind,” an anonymous U.S. official told Axios on Wednesday. You don’t say? According to the report, one of the “main questions” raised at a Monday meeting between President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and their security team was “whether there is a hostage-release and ceasefire in Gaza deal Hamas would ever agree to.” Others raised the “concern” that Washington could pressure Israel to abandon security control of the Philadelphi Corridor, “only to discover that Hamas doesn’t agree to other parts of the deal,” thus making the new offer “the foundation for future negotiations that would be more favorable to Hamas.” We have no doubt that this groundbreaking insight, worthy of a Mazarin or a Metternich, will be studied by American diplomats for generations to come. 

→Nicholas Biase, the chief of public affairs for the Department of Justice’s Southern District of New York, was captured on hidden camera describing the state-level prosecutions of Donald Trump, including Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal prosecution, as “nonsense,” a “perversion of justice,” and “disgusting.” Biase, who made the comments to an undercover reporter working for Steven Crowder’s Mug Club, was particularly scathing about Bragg, the man responsible for Trump’s 34 felony convictions in the so-called “hush money” case. Bragg was “stacking charges and rearranging things just to make it fit a case,” Biase said. “To be honest with you, I think the case is nonsense,” he added. “Every real estate person in New York does what (Trump) did and nobody’s ever been charged with this.” Biase noted that there are strict rules governing the DOJ’s prosecution of presidents and political candidates, but that “the state level is like the fucking Wild West. They’re idiots, they don’t care, they’re all political.” Biase also called District Attorney Fani Willis’ prosecution of Trump in Georgia a “travesty of justice” and Willis herself a “joke.” “The whole thing is disgusting,” he said, “and they’re just out to get (Trump).”

→Hunter Biden entered an open guilty plea today in his federal tax-crimes case in California, agreeing that he “committed conduct that satisfied each of the elements of the crimes alleged”—i.e. nine felony counts related to tax evasion. Earlier in the day, Hunter had attempted to enter an “Alford plea,” in which he would have maintained his innocence but accepted punishment, but prosecutors said they would not accept any plea deal in which Hunter did not admit guilt, and Hunter and his lawyers quickly folded. The plea deal will help the president—and vice president Kamala Harris—avoid the embarrassment of a lengthy public trial that would almost certainly implicate Joe Biden in Hunter’s corrupt influence-peddling schemes with foreign businessmen. Hunter, meanwhile, is likely counting on a pardon from his father, despite Joe Biden’s promises not to pardon his son. 

→In a Thursday speech at the Economic Club of New York, Donald Trump outlined a series of new economic policy proposals, including a 15% corporate tax for companies that make their products in America, the creation of a U.S. sovereign wealth fund, and the introduction of a “government efficiency commission” to be helmed by Elon Musk. The commission would “conduct a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make “recommendations for drastic reform,” Trump said, as reported in The Wall Street Journal. On Wednesday, Musk had shared an April 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office estimating that the U.S. government loses from $233 billion to $521 billion annually to fraud. 

→A gunman was killed by police Thursday morning after opening fire outside the Israeli consulate in Munich, Germany, on the 52nd anniversary of the 1972 terrorist attack on the Munich Olympics. Video on social media shows a young man wielding what appeared to be a bolt-action rifle with a bayonet; no one was injured other than the assailant. The German press has identified the suspect as a “teenage Austrian national”—with Bosnian roots—“who was known to security authorities as an Islamist,” according to The Times of Israel.  

→European intelligence agencies thwarted Iranian plots to conduct terrorist attacks against Jewish institutions in France and Germany using organized crime networks, according to a Thursday report in Der Spiegel. The report mentions an “Abdulkarim S.,” an Algerian-born French drug dealer who was arrested in France earlier this year after traveling to Munich and Berlin to spy on (respectively) the home of a Jewish family and the office of a Jewish lawyer. Abdulkarim, who spent eight years in French prison for his involvement in a gang murder in Marseilles, was a member of an Iranian-backed cell led by a drug dealer from Lyon, France, which was responsible for four arson attacks against Israeli-owned businesses in the south of France between December 2023 and January 2024. 

TODAY IN TABLET: 

Notes on Jewish Camp, by Simon Doonan

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The Crisis of Performative Kitsch

Olivier Roy’s new book on culture and identity politics is intuitive, brilliant, and probably wrong

by Marc Weitzmann

In October 2008, Fadi Abboud, president of the Lebanese Industrialists Association—he would be appointed minister of tourism by Saad Hariri the next year—made the following statement: “It is not enough they (Israelis) are stealing our land. They are also stealing our civilization and our cuisine. Hummus and tabouleh belong to the Lebanese people the same way that Feta cheese belongs to the Greeks. It is unfair that hummus should be known across the world as a kosher Israeli or Greek dish. Hummus and tabouleh are Lebanese specialties and must be registered as such.”

Subsequently, a bill was solemnly drafted by the Lebanese parliament to protect hummus from cultural appropriation. The European Union was called on to support it. Then the Palestinians entered the debate, claiming that hummus in fact belonged to them, not the Lebanese—and even less so, of course, to the Israelis. Abboud promptly answered: “Hummus might be debatable, in any case we will be happy if the Palestinians win … But nobody can even discuss whether tabouleh or baba ghannouj are Lebanese.”

In his new book, The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms, the French sociologist Olivier Roy tells the story of “hummus-gate” and reminds us that “accusations of cultural appropriation are in fact founded in a moral judgment: The plight of the dominated is disregarded, and the product of their labor, often exploited, has been stolen … The logic behind this form of taxonomy is that people are only entitled to speak about their own culture, in other words about themselves.”

Roy ridicules a number of other recent incidents that compete with the Lebanese hummus drama for sheer silliness: British Labour MP Dawn Butler, of Jamaican origin, accusing chef Jamie Oliver of cultural appropriation in 2018 for marketing a culinary product as “jerk rice”; Gucci accused of the same for selling a Sikh-style turban at a price of over 700 euros; the singer Adele, who caused outrage in 2021 for wearing her hair in Bantu knots and wearing a Jamaican flag top; and so on. It is a list, as Roy rightly notes, that “looks a lot like the UNESCO inventory of intangible heritage.” Roy’s point is that the gap between the dour seriousness of those who take offense at such violations of cultural roots and national and personal identities, and the obvious harmlessness of the actual offenses (the “authenticity” of a plate of hummus), can no longer even be laughed at. Everything is existential and deadly serious; everything is “cultural” and a matter of honor. This is the world of “the narcissism of small differences,” as Freud once called it—adding that it almost invariably leads to racism, antisemitism, and misogyny.

But how did it become so ubiquitous? Roy, an intellectual celebrity in France and one of the country’s foremost thinkers on the Muslim world, has an answer, and it’s a very suggestive one: Globalization is not creating a universal culture, as almost everyone assumed it would, but a universal erosion of all cultures. Under the influence of globalization, Roy argues, even the word “culture” tends to become elusive, meaning both everything and increasingly nothing at all.

A political scientist and philosopher by trade, Roy defines “culture” both anthropologically—as the set of beliefs, values, and manners that he calls “the imaginary,” implicitly understood by every member of a group that defines itself by it—and as an artistic canon—the works of art born out of a group’s imaginaries but universal in scope and purpose. In Roy’s view, these two aspects of what we mean by culture are historically linked to the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century, particularly in the West. But they are not without paradoxes: “High culture professes to be a monument to civilization, in other words demonstrating the greatness of the human spirit wherever it may originate,” he writes, “whereas it is underpinned by a nation building project, in the spirit of the Treaties of Westphalia of 1648, which established the functions of national sovereignty for European states.”

That globalization has exacerbated this paradox is only part of the current problem. Roy sees what we call assimilation as a two-step process: The first, which he calls “deculturation,” is the moment when a group sees its culture destroyed by another through the conquest of soft power. The second, “acculturation,” is the dynamic in which that same group assimilates at least partly into the new, dominant culture, while also changing along the way—retaining some aspects of the old culture but ultimately transforming beyond recognition. For instance, says Roy, “Gallic society and its language have disappeared, but Gallic populations blended into a new Roman (and hardly Gallic) ensemble.” Roy focuses on the examples of the Inuit and American Indians to demonstrate how slow and painful that transformation can be, especially when, as he says, “the opportunities for accessing the dominant culture are blocked” by racism and segregation, leaving the dominated group to mourn its old, futureless culture. Roy does not mention them, but the rise of the secular Jewish Yiddishkeit in Europe in the 19th century, with its assimilation into the urban life of the continent, and the paradoxes and contradictions experienced by African Americans in the United States during and after the Civil Rights Movement, are additional examples of this protean process through which culture, and history, are made.

Whether a group assimilates fully, partially, or not at all, there has always been at least a dominant culture of reference for the group to either join or rebel against. But the mere existence of a clearly defined culture, according to Roy, is precisely what globalization has eroded. The result is that today, even members of the theoretically dominant culture instead feel “dominated,” threatened, and no longer in possession of their cultural bearings. In India, for instance, Hindus form the vast majority of the population and are culturally and politically hegemonic, but their cultural insecurity is such that they have felt the need to propel the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi to power in 2014 and to keep him there. According to Roy, a similar fear drove white Americans to support Donald Trump in 2016, Italians into the arms of Giorgia Meloni, the French middle-class toward Marine Le Pen, and the French defenders of laicité to ban the Muslim veil in public offices and high schools.

To account for this fear of cultural domination even among members of dominant cultural groups, Roy blames four factors: the “hedonist,” “individualist” revolution of 1968 (its sexual aspect in particular); the neoliberal financial globalization of the 1980s (which he says put the last nail in the coffin of “traditional values”); the invention and spread of the internet; and the melting away of physical borders after the end of the Cold War.

The result, says Roy, is that there is no longer any center of gravity from which a legitimate, enviable, or universal model of culture can spread. The United States played that part between 1945 and the end of the 1990s, but ever since, what was generally assumed to be a global process of “westernization” turned out instead to be a process of de-westernization—i.e., of the creation of a void where Western culture was once globally dominant. Acculturation, says Roy, is therefore no longer possible—acculturation to what? If “modernity” has turned into a provincial, empty, permanent present, as Roy believes, then we are all like the Inuit, wandering among the shambles of old histories and local cultures.

“Globalized culture,” Roy expounds, “is by definition a kitsch culture”: “Athena in manga, the feudal knight against the Buddhist Karateka, the Middle Ages in science fiction, and on scraps of places, period and historical figures that are all … unmoored, and that can ‘speak’ to everyone.” One can only imagine what he made of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. But Roy’s serious point is that the disappearance of culture, which is something that can be shared, necessitates the elevation of “identity,” which cannot, as the central fact of group and individual life. Complex national or transnational histories are being replaced by cultural markers removed from their contexts, extracted from now-incomprehensible historical texture, and recoded as metonymy for the real thing, which has vanished. Thus you get hummus for the Lebanese, hair knots for the Bantu, jerk rice for the Jamaicans—and, I would add, kaffiyeh for the Palestinians—all of which Roy refers to as folklorèmes.

The old cosmopolitan’s dream, in which one could feel truly at home everywhere, has turned into a reality in which one feels homeless more or less everywhere. In a world where nothing is self-evident, everything becomes performative: “I am what the code indicates that I am,” as Roy brilliantly writes. The more advanced process of de-historicization at work in China—where an inclusive, pseudo-Confucian narrative serves to cover an ultrapowerful normative system of social control, while the traditional culture is destroyed at amazing speeds—gives an indication of where all this is going.

***

There is no question that The Crisis of Culture addresses one of the most fundamental issues of the 21st century. It is a thin volume, as frequently ingenious and full of intuition as it is incomplete, and sometimes frustratingly sketchy. The critical process by which the polyglot and cosmopolitan culture of the European aristocrats of the 17th and 18th centuries gave way to different national cultures at the turn of the 19th, for example, is dispensed with in barely two paragraphs; the cosmopolitan Jewry that replaced it until the Shoah is missing entirely. In general, specific historical considerations are barely treated at all, with pride of place given instead to intellectual speculation. In this sense, The Crisis of Culture could not be more arrogantly French. Or, to put it perhaps more accurately, more Baudrillardian.

Although discreet, the subjectivity undergirding the book is unmistakable. Roy himself acknowledges it when he writes about his own experience in Afghanistan, where he first went in 1969 at the age of 19, and returned to in 1980 as a young historian appointed to the French National Center for Scientific Research, during which he fought with the mujahedeen against the Red Army in a unit the Afghans called “the foreigners’ movement,” composed of volunteers from all over the world (including Osama bin Laden, whom he did not meet). By his own admission, the most fascinating episode of Roy’s long journey remains his flight from the country to Pakistan disguised as an Afghan peasant, with his then-wife hidden under a burqa, to escape border controls. The experience was so profound that as late as 2017, Roy was still referring to it as “an initiation” (to what remains unclear), “a symbiotic moment, a physical mutation.”

For Roy, this was the beginning of a lifelong meditation on the destruction of traditional cultures and religions, which he’s written about in Afghanistan, Islam and Political Modernity, Globalized Islam, Holy Ignorance, and Is Europe Christian?, among other books. Today, Roy is known in France as the opposite number of Gilles Kepel, the country’s other great “Islamologist,” whose writings on the subject haven’t been as brutally contradicted by reality in recent years as Roy’s have. Roy is the kind of man who, in 2012, three days after the murder of Jewish children at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, and before any investigation into the killings had even begun, rushed out an op-ed in The New York Times urging to readers that the killer, Mohamed Merah, “was not known for his piety: He did not belong to any radical group or even to a local Islamic movement,” and that he was just “a petty delinquent, psychologically fragile.” In advising the French government on matters of Islamic communities for decades, Roy has always denied that Islamist networks of influence and belief in the country have had any kind of significance, insisting instead that “jihadism is a nihilist and generational revolt” of the youth brought on by “modernity,” which has produced not a “radicalization of Islam” but an “Islamization of radicalism.”

Roy’s professional biography and prior work matter, because they both crop up from time and again in The Crisis of Culture. The whole intellectual scaffolding of the book, in fact, can sometimes appear as a defense of his career-making idea, which he has developed over decades, that Islamic terrorism has no relationship at all to religion as such, but instead is the result of the postmodern “codes” that have replaced it. There is, in other words, an implicit link between Roy’s contention that the traditional beliefs, values, and manners of “culture” no longer exist, and his longstanding claim that Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood have had no influence whatsoever on radicalized Islamic communities in France, and his advocacy for teaching what he sees as “true” Islam in order to prevent the radicalization of the youth.

Roy thus manages to restate in The Crisis of Culture, which was published in French in 2022, that “The trial relating to the 13 November 2015 attacks in Paris … began with the assumption that the perpetrators came from a Salafist ecosystem comprising in this case the town of Molenbeek, Belgium, but it gradually became apparent that they had no ties with a hypothetical ‘Muslim community.’” But such a contention is the product of either willful blindness or simple disinformation, because the investigations and trials that followed the 2015 attacks amply demonstrated the precise opposite. We know beyond any doubt now that Merah, for example, was trained by a Salafist group whose two main figures, the Clain brothers—who spent years between Molenbeek and Toulouse disseminating Islamist propaganda provided by a then-Saudi-backed Islamic center, and who ended up in Syria with ISIS—claimed responsibility for the Nov. 13 Bataclan attack that killed 130 people. Seven years on, what remained “hypothetical” about that?

Perhaps it is because in 50 years he has never mastered either Arabic, Dari, Pashto, or Farsi that Roy has clung to an essentially existential vision of things, too expansive to be contradicted by the individual facts of religiously inspired violent acts, like the Saudi, Qatari, and Iranian financial networks that have sustained periodic terror activity in France and elsewhere since the 1980s. Even if he is right that Islamic terrorism is just the “Islamization of radicalism,” it still would not explain how or why such nihilism has found strength and legitimacy among some radicalized groups and individuals more than others.

The Crisis of Culture is therefore best read as an insightful and often brilliant theoretical framework that can fall apart when applied to the specific human actions it is meant to explain. To understand why old systems and cultures have become pathologized, it does not suffice to claim that they have simply disappeared, or exist only as innocuous folklorème. They are still with us, even if only in the guise of radicalism—calling for performative action.