Useful idiots

Greetings from Vladimir

For all the professed outrage over Russian interference with our electoral process (no, real, there have been complaints about this — you can look it up), almost zero attention — except here — has been paid to the genuine disinformation campaign against fracking, brought to us by Gazprom/Putin.

POSTED ON NOVEMBER 29, 2019 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN LOOSE ENDS

• Speaking of Russian collusion, I wonder whether any of the usual people on the left will pick up on the evidence of the massive Russian propaganda campaign to hobble fracking for oil and natural gas in Britain and elsewhere? Here’s the heart of a new story by Matt Ridley in The Critic in the UK:

The Russians also lobbied behind the scenes against shale gas, worried about losing their grip on the world’s gas supplies. Unlike most conspiracy theories about Russian meddling in Western politics, this one is out there in plain sight. The head of Nato, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the Russians, as part of a sophisticated disinformation operation, “engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations — environmental organisations working against shale gas — to maintain Europe’s dependence on imported Russian gas”.

The Centre for European Studies found that the Russian government has invested $95 million in NGOs campaigning against shale gas. Russia Today television ran endless anti-fracking stories, including one that “frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles”. The US Director of National Intelligence stated that “RT runs anti-fracking programming … reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s profitability.” . .

We had the isolationist “America First” movement during the Molotov- Ribbentrop pact, directed from Moscow and promoted full-throatedly by Hollywood, which changed literally overnight to “Second Front Now” when Hitler breached the treaty and invaded the USSR, the anti-war Vietnam protests, and now, the anti-fracking campaign. It’s not that Cuomo, Jim Himes, and the entire motley slate of current Demorat presidential candidates and greens are knowingly doing Putin’s bidding, but it’s precisely their ignorance that makes them useful idiots.