The Kremlin-controlled Russian media have been trumpeting the news of the U.S. college admissions scandal, grossly exaggerating its scale.
Since before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Kremlin has been pushing a manufactured issue of prospects of a civil war in America, claiming that white blue-collar workers in the country are getting increasingly disenfranchised.
Most recently the Kremlin has used the college admissions scandal to back up its claim. One of its propagandists’ favorite talking points is that “Collegegate” has eclipsed Russiagate and the Mueller investigation.
President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine lays an unsubstantiated claim that there is hardly a university in the United States that’s not mired in corruption. The allegation is that the universities — the “famous” American social elevators — are broken, which makes the social divide between the haves and the have-nots unbreachable under the existing political system.
The Kremlin propaganda further maintains that the have-nots in the American society are getting increasingly and irreversibly cognizant of that social divide and disillusioned of the American dream, which the Kremlin claims is dead.
So Mr. Putin has been pushing that narrative through the news channels and the social media to suggest that a civil war in the United States is inevitable.
The message is an easy sell to the rank and file in Russia because Mr. Putin controls the television, from which about 70 percent of the Russians get practically all their news and commentary, according to a recent poll by Russia’s independent Levada Center.
It is also quite believable to most Russians because of the all-pervasive, systemic corruption in Russia, not in the least in the universities, where about half of students admit that they are aware of bribery in their respective colleges, according to the Russian media. So it’s easy to imagine for the Russian public that America is no different.
The American public, by and large, is another matter however.
Kremlin propagandists are savvy enough to know that.
So — since well before the 2016 election — they’ve been differentiating their message, separately targeting the left and the right in the United States with inflammatory rhetoric and fake-news messages, repeatedly employing the term “civil war.”
That serves the Kremlin’s ultimate goal to weaken the United States to the point where it gives up its global leadership — just as the U.S. intelligence services have warned us.
Mr. Putin believes that would make his position and stature inside and outside of Russia more secure.
The main tools the Kremlin has relied upon in promoting that message in the United States are its official television channel Russia Today and social media.
Fortunately, their credibility is flawed because they are traceable back to Russia — thanks to the pushback in the U.S. mainstream media.
Unfortunately, though, the Kremlin has a booster who periodically sends out effectively the same message and who according to opinion polls is credible to about 40 percent of the U.S. public — President Trump, who often makes what some deem as divisive statements, which at times seem to echo the Kremlin message.
One of Mr. Trump’s recent pronouncements of that sort was made this month in an Oval Office interview with writers from Breitbart, a right-wing news site.
Said Mr. Trump, according to the New York Times: “You know, the left plays a tougher game. It’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. OK? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump.
“I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
Mr. Trump appears to be threatening violence should the Democrats continue to oppose him.
A U.S. president is supposed to speak to and represent all Americans, and not just his base, and be a uniting force as opposed to a dividing one.
As long as we don’t have a president who does, the Kremlin propaganda will remain a threat to our society.
Mike Sigov, a former Russian journalist in Moscow, is a U.S. citizen and a staff writer at The Blade.
First Published March 24, 2019, 10:30 a.m.
