Over the weekend, far-right protesters led by Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys clashed with leftist anti-fascist protesters in Portland, Ore. The protest turned violent and the police joined in, firing rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades. National media showed smoke-shrouded images of Americans facing off against each other and the police. At the end of the day, however, the winner of the spectacle was Moscow and its goal of dividing the United States and undermining our democratic institutions.
For a bit of history, Russia (and previously the Soviet Union) have long employed tactics to divide countries and sow instability. In the Baltic states and later Western Europe, Moscow employed disinformation tactics to create chaos to undermine alliances and support for West Germany. These were the same tactics, albeit with the addition of imported “separatist” fighters, that the Kremlin has more recently employed in Ukraine.
Today, Putin is exploiting the opportunity to employ similar disinformation and chaos-spreading tactics in America. The goal is to keep the country divided, pit Americans against Americans and ensure that the country is unwilling and unable to confront very real foreign policy challenges from Russia.
A good example of how this tactic works is the recently uncovered plot to deepen partisan divides through Facebook groups, events, and pages such as the coordinated accounts uncovered last week. Those pages were specifically designed to whip up agitation and confrontation with other Americans. While the attribution of those accounts has yet to be linked to the Kremlin, the tactic is very similar to campaigns linked to Russia and used during the 2016 election.
Instead of working tighter and trying to understand the divisions that have and continue to rip through the U.S., Americans are buying into the Kremlin’s narratives and then going after each other in the streets.
We have to do better than that.
Police and municipal governments need to do a better job of preventing violent clashes and refrain, if possible, from engaging in violence of their own. Americans need to do a better job of trying to work together rather than fighting among themselves. Organizers who call themselves patriots (such as Joey Gibson the founder of Patriot Prayer) need to be called out for tactics that promote divisive politics and do more to undermine society than to support free speech, conservatism, or any other cause.
Most of all, however, Americans must recognize the threat the Russia poses and be prepared to counter divisive tactics rather than deepen divides.
After all, as the old adage goes, “united we stand, divided we fall.”
