“I see you got the pink one.”

We’d just settled into a table at a bustling fusion spot near Times Square. He was scrolling aggressively on an iPhone dressed as a flamingo.

“Rose,” he corrected me, without looking up. “Rose gold.” He was C1 proficient at least, but retained a thick Eastern European accent which imparted an air of grandiose finality to everything he said in English. Everything was a declaration.

Rose gold was all the rage that year. Apple rode the wave. “Nah, that’s pink,” I thought, but didn’t say. “Barbie pink.”

Not much made sense about him. An Ivy Leaguer with no post-graduate professional network and no job, he shuttled regularly between New York and a motley collection of European metro non sequiturs. Vienna. Prague. Budapest. Places where people with secrets drop dead during the first 10 pages of a 007 screenplay.

But that was fine. Not much made sense about me either, after all. In fact, I made even less sense than he did, and my life was (and still is) just one long non sequitur.

That our paths ever crossed in the first place was a cosmic accident. I was crashing out of one world and into another when I stumbled into his orbit while learning how to use social media. We exchanged a few messages and that was that at first. Two years later, we reconnected under equally haphazard circumstances. I was on my last stand in New York, holed up at a luxury condo 11 stops down the Harlem Line and he was, as it turned out, in the suburbs just outside the city.

He shared my passion for geopolitics, but not my affinity for facts. When I mentioned, in early 2015, that ISIS sustained itself in large part with revenue from stolen oil — more a casual statement of fact than anything else — he told me ISIS was a CIA creation and intimated that the group’s notoriously macabre propaganda videos might’ve been staged or produced by the US government.

He was keenly interested in Syria’s civil war, and yet he seemed not to want the answers he solicited from me. He knew virtually nothing about the Arab Spring, or pretended not to, insisting instead on a story about a disputed natural gas pipeline. When I told him in the summer of 2015 that Qassem Soleimani — the Iranian spy master assassinated by Donald Trump in 2020 — was very likely pressing Moscow to intervene in the war on behalf of Syrian dictator and Kremlin ally Bashar al-Assad, he became indignant. “Vladimir Putin decides, not Iran Rambo,” he’d jeer, sardonic, employing his trademark blend of counter-narrative and clumsy American pop culture references.

He was obsessed with Europe’s migrant crisis. As an immigrant himself, he should’ve been sympathetic. He was anything but. He’d e-mail me horror stories from European capitals “overrun” by Muslim refugees. At one point, he sent me a picture of German pool rules apparently written to dissuade new arrivals from unacceptable behavior at public swimming venues. He gleefully quoted Geert Wilders, pored over maps of migrant corridors and exalted Viktor Orbán’s infamous border fence.

It’s easy enough to call it bizarre in hindsight, but at the time it didn’t seem especially strange. We were friends, we were both geopolitical news junkies and all of that — the war, the migrant crisis and so on — was news. Big news. The only news that mattered during some weeks.

He and I were different, though. I was far too preoccupied with my own, personal undoing (the second in five years) to trouble myself too much about the undoing of the Western world. By contrast, he seemed to revel in it. Had I not been too inebriated to care, I might’ve asked him why.

The curtain was closing on Barack Obama’s second term and Angela Merkel was under heavy fire for an asylum policy which, while celebrated for its humanity, became a political liability as Europe struggled to absorb refugees fleeing Syria and Iraq. The world order I’d known for most of my life — and all of my adult life — was collapsing.

American society was riven, but not yet irretrievably. He saw the fissures. And he understood how they might soon coalesce to become an unbridgeable ravine. His mastery of divisive American social issues was uncanny. Indeed, this flamboyant Eastern European ensconced in the suburbs of America’s most famous metropolis seemed to understand the US electorate far better than most Americans. The talking points and personalities we now readily associate with America’s culture wars were on his radar a decade ago.

Take then-congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. A natural beauty who counted an Iraq deployment on an impressive-looking resume, Gabbard, an ostensible Democrat, became a darling of the counter-narrative echo chamber courtesy of her out-of-consensus foreign policy views. She met with Assad in 2017, cast doubt on his use of chemical weapons and trafficked regularly in what some critics described as Kremlin-friendly narratives. In 2020, Gabbard made a splash for a contentious exchange with Kamala Harris during a Democratic presidential debate. Gabbard had no shot at the nomination — none — raising questions about why she pretended to run. She left Congress in 2021, left the Democratic party in 2022 (complaining about an “elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness”) and became a regular on Fox News. Gabbard was his favorite congressperson. In 2015.

“Look, look.” He passed me the flamingo. I read the headline on the screen. Some story about a murder. “What?” I asked. He quoted the headline: “Shot. Dead.” “Yeah, so?” “That’s a thing?” he asked. “‘Shot dead’?” Fluent though he was, he was still a non-native speaker. He struggled with English turns of phrase. “Oh, yeah,” I chuckled. “That’s a thing. It’s an expression, but it’s also literal.” He laughed heartily. “Shot dead!”

I apologized a lot during that dinner, which was out of character. I don’t do apologies, particularly not as they relate to my personal life. But I’d become evasive, and I wanted him to know it wasn’t him. I blamed my work habit. “I’ve worked 181 days in a row.” I remember giving him that number. “No, no. That’s no good,” he said, maneuvering words around a half-chewed potsticker. “Burnout: It’s no good.”

It wasn’t burnout. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it wasn’t that. I considered the bowl of edamame nestled between an array of other appetizers. I decided against it. Food — any food — interfered with absorption. Get the first two drinks down. Then — and only then — food.

“Sometimes I just get — I don’t know, claustrophobic,” I told him, turning up a rocks glass on a near 90-degree angle until the two-by-two ice cube sat on my nose. I let it linger for a second, maybe two, siphoning the last drop of something strong. “Your health comes first,” he said, reaching for one of the countless English clichés he’d mastered. “You should take some time off.” “Maybe.”

I didn’t know it then, but I was dying. It wasn’t work. It wasn’t claustrophobia. It wasn’t panic attacks. My organs were giving up. I’d waterboarded them with 80 proof on a daily basis for nearly two decades. They were exhausted. They couldn’t filter the venom anymore. So, they succumbed to it. Or very nearly did.

I drank. He scrolled. And ate. Eventually, I ate too. “Does that not drive you crazy after a while?” He glanced up. “What?” I pointed to the flamingo with a chop stick. “That.” “The news?” he wondered, disingenuously. “That’s not ‘news,'” I chided. “It’s poison. And you know it.” “You really want to talk about it?” he asked. We’d been to that fork in the road before. I wanted to talk about it, but then again, I didn’t. If you don’t have to know, it’s best not to. If anyone understood that, it was me. “No.”

I finished my pad Thai, and he paid the bill. He always paid the bill. There was no point in offering. So I’d stopped. He wrote in a cartoonishly large tip, then scribbled it out and wrote in even more. I knew what was coming next. “And now,” he said, slapping the table with one hand, “we get dances.”

Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, The Global Times, a propaganda mouthpiece for the Chinese government, published an awkwardly-worded article called, “Rising political violence indicates a profound pathological symptom in American democracy.” It featured a cartoon of a hammer hanging precariously over a map of the United States by a frayed string.

The article (and I use that term very loosely), cited Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. The Global Times couldn’t be bothered to write their own summary of Pape’s work. Instead, they copied and pasted from The New York Times‘s coverage, true to form. Chinese and Russian propaganda tends to be as lazy as it is nefarious.

On July 13, the day Trump dodged death, Pape published the results of a June study conducted as part of a wider effort to understand and track support for political violence in America, which he began measuring three years ago under the banner of The Chicago Project on Security and Threats, or CPOST, a non-partisan research center at the university. The poll, which surveyed more than 2,000 Americans from June 20 through June 24, suggested the share of voters who support using violence to restore Trump to the presidency was unchanged versus June of last year, at around 7%.

That figure — 7% — may not sound high under the circumstances, but consider the implication: 18 million US adults believe force would be justified to put Trump back in the Oval Office. The Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, plainly indicates this threat isn’t idle.

As Pape was keen to point out, the share of Americans who believe force would be justified to prevent Trump from securing a second presidential term was actually higher as of late last month than the share who supported using violent coercion to restore him to the presidency.

Extrapolating from the survey using the US Census population estimate of 258 million US adults, 26 million — so, slightly more than 10% — agreed with this statement: “Use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.”

That someone in fact took a shot at Trump indicates this threat is likewise very real. Trump’s would-be assassin was apparently one of those 26 million US adults, an estimated nine million of whom own firearms.

“Why has it escalated to the point where guns are seen as a solution?” The Chinese Communist Party wondered, feigning innocent academic curiosity. “Many people” in America, the Party went on to muse, “no longer believe that democratic processes can address their concerns.”

The implication from Beijing: Better autocracy — one-party, authoritarian rule — than chaos. As Bloomberg put it in one of countless articles published in the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life, “the troubles of Western-style democracy, with the US a glaring example, is a point often made by the Communist authorities in China.”

The hijacking of Pape’s work by China’s propaganda machine on July 14 offered a window into the strategy employed by the Russian and Chinese governments to undermine Western democracies. They sow discord then point to the ensuing chaos as proof that democracy’s dangerous and fatally flawed. Whenever possible, mouthpieces for Moscow and Beijing cite Western media coverage and commentary from Western academics and researchers — like Pape — in a bid to legitimize the narrative.

“The increasing polarization is dividing voters and undermining trust in democratic institutions,” The Global Times’s “Op-Ed” declared. “Each election cycle seems to deepen these divides, pushing some toward the edge of violence.”

Indeed. What the CCP doesn’t mention is the role Beijing and its strategic ally in Moscow play (they aren’t alone, but they’re the principal actors) in deepening, and in some cases even creating, the societal rifts which by now pose an existential threat to some Western democracies, including and especially the US.

Westerners — and, I’d wager, even Western intelligence services — harbor fundamental misconceptions about the nature of foreign influence campaigns, the ultimate goal of which isn’t necessarily to promote the political fortunes of any specific individual or party.

If you’re the Kremlin, the ascension of useful idiots to positions of power across the democratic world certainly is fortuitous. To the extent Moscow believes it’s possible to swing elections in favor of such candidates, they’re more than willing to engage. To use the most obvious example, there’s little doubt that Trump’s unlikely usurpation of the highest office on Earth was greeted in Moscow with a very large measure of astonished jollity.

But developing political assets is time consuming, resource intensive, risky and not guaranteed to pay off. In market parlance, the Sharpe ratio on such efforts is often quite low. And old school espionage isn’t especially scalable.

By contrast, misinformation campaigns which leverage social media to sow division, doubt and discord among vulnerable Western electorates are cheap, low-risk, high-reward and infinitely scalable. Most importantly, such operations allow autocratic governments, chief among them Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, to pursue the big prize: The destruction of democracy itself.

It’s difficult to overstate how efficient social media is when it comes to information warfare. Disinformation and counter-narrative are highly contagious. They spread like a virus, infecting the vulnerable — the under-educated, the disaffected — first. The narratives ricochet, echo and reverberate through “likes,” re-posts and other social media interactions such that it quickly becomes impossible to trace the source. The most successful such campaigns involve very little direct amplification by the originating, state-linked entity, and as such become almost organic and anyway completely untraceable — the disinformation equivalent of a gun with a filed-off serial number.

All it takes is one credulous lawmaker, one influencer, one vengeful tech mogul or one reality TV show host with a chip on his shoulder and unfulfilled political ambitions, to turn a false narrative into a viral hashtag.

The push back from those who know a lie when they hear it (the uninfected, if you will) is spun by the poisoned as an inadvertent admission of complicity: If you deny the existence of a conspiracy, you must be in on it.

Confronted with what looks, to them, like unfathomable stupidity, the uninfected become acerbic and mocking. “What kind of moron would believe this drivel?” Stunned and disheartened at the credulity of their fellows and family members, they disavow them. Colleagues, friends, uncles, aunts, sisters, brothers — even spouses, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons, are written off as morons. Dolts. Irredeemable. Irreclaimable. Hopeless. The deplorables, thus ostracized and ridiculed, circle the wagons. The battle lines are drawn.

At that point, every issue, no matter how innocuous, is contextualized by the same societal split. Issues which were already contentions (flashpoints like abortion and immigration, for example) become veritable powder kegs capable of inciting people to spontaneous violence. Foreign policy debates about which the vast majority of voters are completely ignorant are likewise subsumed such that rural whites who couldn’t identify Canada on a map can tell you why the Donbas is rightfully Russia’s and twentysomethings who this time last year thought the Gaza Strip was a row of tequila bars in Cancún are prepared to go to jail for Palestinian statehood.

America’s adversaries no longer need resort to outright lies to sow chaos. They can simply amplify both sides of the debate. Any debate. Pick an issue, any issue. They’re all violently contentious now, and the entire nation’s roped in, from everyday people lambasting one another on social media to lawmakers litigating the culture wars on Capitol Hill to the Supreme Court, where the conservative majority’s regressive social engineering experiment feels overtly vindictive.

Both sides are thoroughly convinced not only that the other’s an existential threat to their ideals and way of life, but also to democracy itself. Joe Biden and Democrats say Donald Trump and the GOP are hell-bent on establishing an illiberal, authoritarian dystopia in the style of Orbán’s Hungary. Trump and Republicans say Biden and Democrats have turned America into a banana republic with intolerably high inflation and a weaponized Justice Department that prosecutes political rivals.

The current state of affairs in America can be traced, in no small part, to socioeconomic trends dating back to the 1980s. It also represents a long overdue reckoning with the country’s many demons, and a referendum on what kind of country America wants to be a decade hence. But in many respects, the fractured state of the republic is the culmination of a Russian information war against the West which began in earnest over a decade ago. The Kremlin has succeeded in facilitating the near complete dissolution of civil society in the US, to the point that many Americans fear a civil war might be inevitable.

It’s tempting to blame Fox News and its progeny. And indeed, a lot of blame can be placed at that doorstep. But as Ian Garner, a historian and translator of Russian war propaganda, put it in a recent article for Foreign Policy, the West “is still oblivious” to what actually befell it since 2014.

Garner described Tucker Carlson’s February interview with Vladimir Putin as a spectacle that would’ve been “unthinkable a generation ago,” but which today “is so normal as to be almost unremarkable.”

Carlson’s interview with Putin was, of course, streamed and promoted across Western social media platforms, garnering God only knows how many views from voters in the democratic world. It was, Garner wrote, just “the latest successful foray in Russia’s information war against the West” which he was keen to note relies heavily on “Westerners themselves” spreading the “good” word.

Disinformation campaigns are nothing new for Russia, of course. What is new, Garner emphasized, “is a polarized Western public’s enthusiasm for re-centering its own identity around Moscow’s narratives — and becoming an unwitting weapon in the information war.”

The key point to grasp is the extent to which the Kremlin has succeeded in a kind of Inception-style mental coup wherein Westerners, including the likes of Carlson and Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance, are in some cases genuinely unaware of the possibility that their opinions aren’t actually their own. As Garner put it, “ordinary [people] are certain they are merely speaking their minds” when in fact, the Kremlin has turned “domestic policy issue[s] into a vehicle for Moscow to exert influence.”

In the same article, Garner cited an alarming statistic: Westerners viewed content linked to Kremlin social media accounts an estimated 16 billion times (that’s billion, with a “b”) in the first 12 months after Putin invaded Ukraine. That content, he went on, is designed not just to sway public opinion in the West against funding and arming Kyiv, but “to actively damage Western democratic systems.”

Again, Westerners, including elected officials and security services, appear almost completely ignorant both to the scope and methodology of Putin’s disinformation war, and hybrid threats more generally. Even when Washington does recognize such threats, America seems so committed to an absolutist version of the First Amendment that the country’s prepared to sacrifice democracy itself at the altar of a free speech. As Garner wrote, Western governments “mistakenly circumscribe Russia’s hybrid warfare as a discrete, restricted, and targeted policy of disruption [when] in reality, it is an ongoing, fluid and broad phenomenon that invites continued violence.”

Donald Trump’s rise to the top of American politics was indeed auspicious for the Kremlin, but perhaps not for the reasons many observers are inclined to believe. Whatever he might (or might not) do in a second term, Trump didn’t pull the US out of NATO and although he kowtowed to dictators, including Putin, he took a hard-line stance on Iran and China. There’s scant evidence to suggest America’s relationship with Russia was better under Trump than it was under Obama, and some evidence to suggest it was worse.

But that misses the forest for the trees. Trump’s rise to power in the US on the back of the same divisive politics and culture wars promoted ceaselessly by the Kremlin on Western social media (often in a candidate-agnostic way so as to inflame both sides of the debate) accelerated the unraveling of America’s tattered, threadbare social fabric. Eight years later, poll after poll suggests Americans have lost almost all faith in their institutions and, relatedly, in each other.

For autocratic governments hell-bent on undermining democracy across the Western world, one could scarcely conjure a better outcome than an America where 18 million people believe violence is justified to restore the last president. An America where 26 million people believe violence is justified to prevent the last president from serving another term. An America where people no longer respect the results of elections. An America where the peaceful transfer of power is no longer taken for granted. An America where mobs ransack the legislature. An America where “guns are seen as a solution,” as Xi’s propaganda machine put it this month. An America on the brink of civil war. If that’s democracy, who wants it?

I despise strip clubs.

“Him and these f–kin’ dances.” It was cold, and I was standing outside of an ATM cubicle smoking a Camel. “Dances,” I muttered to myself, mimicking his accent.

He was inside, on the flamingo. I don’t know how much he tried to withdraw, but the bank locked his card. I stuck my head in. “I can pay for it. Just tell me how much we need.” He waved me away.

A few minutes later, he emerged with cash and handed me too much of it. “I can’t spend all this in there, it’s against my constitution.” “Keep it then,” he said, and then, between a smile: “You know I can make you rich.” “Yeah, yeah.”

We checked our coats and I navigated through bikinis and suits to get to the bar. The selection was pitiable. “Canadian Club,” I shouted, over deafening rap. “In it to win it?!” the bartender shouted back. “What?” “I said, anything in it?!” “Oh. Splash of hooker spit, please.” She either didn’t hear me or didn’t appreciate the joke. I handed her a $50 and walked over to meet him on a couch by a pole dancer. I indulged him: “Dances.” “Dances!” he boomed.

An hour came and went, then two, then three. Easy come, easy go, like so much money lost to liquor and tossed to licentiousness. The night ended like they all did: With a pretty girl leading him away into a private room, leaving me free to go.

I never saw him again after that night. Not in person. He’s still out there, though, I’d wager. Slinking through midtown, a wolf in a Merino sweater. If he is still in America, I imagine he likes what he sees.

---