#autocracies

It's clear that America's autocratic enemies desperately want to elect Trump. It's the cheapest way for kleptocrats in Russia, North Korea, Iran, and North Korea to weaken the United States.

Foreign dictators manipulating US media is not new. But now we see Putin making direct monetary investments in platforms which promote stooges for the Kremlin.

The indictment unsealed in New York’s Southern District accused two employees of RT, the Kremlin’s media arm, of funneling nearly $10 million to an unidentified company, described only as “Company 1” in court documents. CNN has independently confirmed that “Company 1” is Tenet Media, which is a platform for independent content creators. It is self-described as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues,” according to its website, which matches language contained in the newly unsealed indictment. The alleged Russian operation tapped two people to set up the company in their names to add to its legitimacy and the two founders were aware Russian money backed the operation, according to the indictment. The goal of the operation, according to prosecutors, was to fuel pro-Russian narratives, in part, by pushing content and news articles favoring Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and others who the Kremlin deemed to be friendlier to its interests. Among the commentators listed on Tenet Media’s website are right-wing personalities Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin. All have released statements saying they were victims of the alleged Russian scheme and they maintained editorial control of the content they created. Each has a loyal fanbase online, with a combined roughly 6 million followers on YouTube alone. Pool interviewed Trump on his podcast in May.

Tenet Media was just one of Putin's tentacles in US media.

The DOJ’s revealing of the alleged Russian plot was part of a wider set of actions the Biden administration announced Wednesday it was taking to tackle a major Russian government-backed effort to influence the 2024 US presidential election including sanctions on 10 individuals and entities, and the seizure of 32 internet domains. At Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direction, three Russian companies used fake profiles to promote false narratives on social media, US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement. Internal documents produced by one of those Russian companies show one of the goals of the propaganda effort was to boost the candidacy of Trump or whoever emerged as the Republican nominee for president, according to an FBI affidavit.

Putin tried to deflect the negative publicity by claiming he liked Kamala Harris's laugh. Of course his puppet Weird Donald doesn't have a laugh – just a malicious sneer.

Putin will continue to try to interfere in elections until it becomes too costly for him to do so.

RELATED: The Kremlin has Putin-friendly influencers sowing pro-Trump propaganda.

Unsealed FBI Doc Exposes Terrifying Depth of Russian Disinfo Scheme

Autocracy, Inc: Anne Applebaum and Ruth Ben-Ghiat in Conversation

The 92nd Street Y, New York

An important conversation from July.

Fossil fuels are not just terrible for the planet, they are bad for democracy. A disproportionate number of major oil and gas exporters are autocracies such as Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.

Russia in particular uses fossil fuel sales to fund repression at home and imperialism abroad.

Putin appears weaker than ever – and for a ruler who relies on projecting strength, that’s a bad look. To further dull Putin’s fading aura of invincibility, and to ultimately lead to a reversal of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we need to undermine the pillars his strongman myth is based on: colonial conquest, unregulated capitalism and climate abuse. As questions are raised about his ability to rule, Putin will claim that despite the efforts of the nefarious “collective west”, the Russian economy can stabilise because the world needs Russian fossil fuels; that the need of western companies to make money in Russia means it will never be truly isolated; that for all his blunders on the battlefield, he can still hold on to swathes of Ukraine and its resources, which he will dole out between the Russian system’s stakeholders for whom the risk of sticking with Putin will thus still be smaller than the risk of going against him.

No matter what the source of the oil or gas we consume, we push up the international price of those commodities whenever we use them. It's supply and demand; when we reduce our demand, the price goes down and dictators/theocrats get lower profits.

We need to recognise the fact that human rights, security and economic ties are deeply intertwined, and to alter our behaviour accordingly. Let’s stop selling dictators the rope with which they hang people: our neighbours – and ultimately us. And if there’s one base element that powers Putin’s claims to invincibility, it’s reliance on fossil fuels. The battle against Putin is also the battle against climate crisis. As Prof Alexander Etkind lays out in his new book, Russia Against Modernity, Putin’s economy has been up to two-thirds dependent on oil and gas exports, largely to Europe, and crucially through pipelines that cross Ukraine. Etkind argues that Putin launched his invasion in part to control this flow. Moreover, he wanted to destabilise Europe, flooding it with refugees and instilling so much chaos and fear that Europe would be forced to abandon plans for net zero carbon emissions by 2050. As so often in the course of this war, Putin’s aims have backfired. The invasion has led to a decrease in dependence on Russian energy. Putin’s aura of fossil-fuelled invincibility has been shaken, but we are only part of the way there. Faster decarbonisation is the most sustainable way to not only undermine Putin, but also to limit the opportunity for future Russian leaders and other resource-rich authoritarians to wage aggressive wars.

Decarbonization is also de-Putinization. We contribute to peace and stability when we lessen the amount of fossil fuels we consume. And, of course, we slow down and eventually halt the warming of our planet.

The world is actively sorting itself into democracies and autocracies, this is Iran and Saudi Arabia aligning themselves with the latter. I think we long knew that Saudi Arabia was not going to enter the ranks of democratic countries anytime soon but, especially with the recent protests, there was some hope that Iran would.

Nations in Transit is a catalogue of reform efforts; its methodology is rooted in the assumption that transition away from a nondemocratic system and toward something more democratic is both possible and desirable. Yet 2020 was not a good year for reform, and in many countries where there had been hope for change, much of the momentum seems to have drained away.

In Armenia, the war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh has triggered a domestic crisis that risks undoing the success of the 2018 Velvet Revolution. The country’s democracy score declined for the first time since the revolution, and developments to date this year, including tensions between the military and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, demonstrate that the situation could grow worse. In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s reform efforts met with strong resistance from the judiciary as entrenched interests fought to preserve the status quo. The opportunity to uproot Ukraine’s corrupt, oligarchic system is closing, and steps in early 2021, such as the controversial shutdown of oligarch-owned television networks, underscore the difficulty of upholding democratic principles while confronting a stubbornly undemocratic establishment.

In Moldova, the election of Maia Sandu as president in late 2020 raised hopes for change, but her attempts to overcome hostility in the parliament in 2021 have led to protracted political and interinstitutional struggle, which could further weaken democratic safeguards. In Georgia, the opposition’s boycott of 2020 parliamentary elections and the February 2021 arrest of opposition leader Nika Melia clearly demonstrated the end of the country’s recent reform attempts. Georgia’s democracy score is now close to where it was a decade ago, before the current ruling party rode to power on a wave of public frustration with the increasingly autocratic incumbents.

By contrast, in North Macedonia and Uzbekistan, piecemeal efforts have yielded some positive change on the ground, resulting in improvements in the countries’ scores. The reforms in Uzbekistan—including in the agricultural and judicial sectors—are improving citizens’ lives, though they are clearly not aimed at cultivating democracy or allowing genuine political pluralism. In North Macedonia, meanwhile, Prime Minister Zoran Zaev’s center-left government has repaired some of the institutional damage wrought by his right-wing populist predecessor, and still has a chance to deliver the benefits of democracy.

Deepening autocracy in Eurasia

The entrenchment and expansion of antidemocratic norms and ideas is not a new phenomenon for the broader region. Such practices and innovations have long been shared between Russia and its neighborhood. Over the past decade, there has been a proliferation of “foreign agents” laws to crack down on civil society, the use of legislation on extremism and counterterrorism to silence political opponents, and the creation of puppet organizations that legitimize authoritarian governments and affirm their sovereignty.

But in Russia and the rest of the Nations in Transit region’s eastern half, this pattern has taken a noticeable turn toward deepening autocratization.

For the first time in the report’s history, Russia’s score on the National Democratic Governance indicator bottomed out, reflecting President Putin’s absolute control after the fraudulent 2020 constitutional referendum and his vicious efforts to silence dissenting voices. The attempted murder of Aleksey Navalny in 2020 and his imprisonment in a notorious penal colony this year was just the most prominent demonstration of the regime’s cruelty. The suppression of protests with unprecedented severity, the extension of the foreign agents law to practically any citizen involved in political activities, and plans to tighten state control over the internet all suggest that the Kremlin is fearful of its critics and determined to secure a choreographed victory in the fall 2021 elections by any means necessary.

Similarly, in Belarus, the brutal crackdown on protests that followed the fraudulent 2020 presidential election represented a significant escalation for Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s regime. After years of repression punctuated by periods of diplomatic thaw, Lukashenka faced a groundswell of opposition as protesters from all walks of life united behind the prodemocracy candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Yet after months of mass arrests, beatings, torture, and the incarceration of scores of political prisoners, the vision of a more democratic Belarus now seems increasingly distant.

Kyrgyzstan, the only country in Central Asia that was reasonably close to emerging from the category of Consolidated Authoritarian Regimes, experienced a violent and extralegal power grab in 2020 by a political outcast and former prison inmate with links to organized crime. The confirmation of Sadyr Japarov’s rise to the presidency in January 2021, even if he is supported by a significant portion of the population, signals a return to strongman rule, and upcoming changes to the constitution are likely to further fortify his dominant position.

Perhaps the only bright spot in Eurasia was civil society’s incredible resilience in the face of democratic deterioration and the coronavirus pandemic. Organized civic groups, ad hoc grassroots initiatives, and conscientious citizens joined forces to fill the void left by the state in 2020. This exposed the massive governance failures of autocratic regimes while providing the population with much-needed help and hope in a time of crisis.

The Overlooked Hallmark of the Trump Administration—and Other Autocracies

The images of the first people to receive the COVID-19 vaccine promise the end of this particular nightmare. But it’s likely that hundreds of thousands more will die in the United States before the pandemic is over. The return to life without social distancing and isolation, the end to our loneliness, could proceed with unnecessary slowness because the Trump Administration did not secure as many…