The Best Populism Money Can Buy: How The Billionaire Right Is Creating A Fake Movement
It started in Michigan, with a rally of thousands demanding Governor Gretchen Whitmer “reopen” the state and curb social distancing requirements. Protestors blocked intersections. Carried guns. Waved Confederate and Nazi flags. Called covid-19 a hoax and a conspiracy to take the rights of the people.
Since then, several other protests have popped up around the country, from New Hampshire to Texas and back again. Fox News has promoted the events and Donald Trump, in his usual style, called the protestors “very responsible people” in a way that drew a concrete line from them to the infamous white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In his briefings, Trump has cited the protestors and the movement as proof that Americans are dying to get back to normal and move on from the pandemic. Even though polls show that over half of Americans are fearful of cutting back on restrictions too soon, Trump has used the events to push his agenda to “Open American Again,” and jumpstart his reelection campaign.
The problem is that none of this is even remotely real.
The spark in this “movement” was Michigan, but it was far from organic. The Michigan Freedom Fund (MFF) is a shadowy organization that has received large amounts of funding from the DeVos’s, one of the state’s most prominent families. Worth billions from their Amway business, the DeVos’s have been active in all realms of American life. Erik Prince is the founder of the Blackwater paramilitary, mercenary group and has worked for Donald Trump and conservatives by using his military intelligence background to infiltrate liberal groups in order to gather intelligence and undermine them. Betsy DeVos is Trump’s Secretary of Education and is dedicated to eradicating public education as we know it.
How this works is that America’s politically active billionaires rely on faceless organizations to carry out their political wishes and subterfuge in order to keep their names directly out of the press. There is a massive precedent for this. In one of the most effective programs in the history of the United States, the billionaire Koch Brothers bankrolled the Tea Party “movement” in 2010 and turned it into a national political entity that threatened to overtake the Republican Party.
By studying the rise of the Tea Party, we get an idea of just how the Reopen American “movement” is coming together. With the Tea Party, Fox News used the gatherings and rallies as a vehicle to attack President Barack Obama without having to rely on the toxic subject of race. Tea Partiers claimed they were opposed to Obama on the subject of bailouts and spending, and the large crowds of angry white Americans made for excellent coverage to prove Fox’s thesis against him.
How the Republican Party came to embrace the Tea Party is a larger story and the penultimate chapter in how the GOP realized its destiny as a political death cult. Faced with a popular president in Obama, Republicans seized on the fabricated Tea Party as a base and realized quickly if they didn’t lend it their support and assimilate it, it might very well replace them as the conservative party in America. It was a poison pill. Republicans were pushed farther right and soon came to be populated and controlled by a legion of Tea Party members who believed the manipulations and propaganda that had spurred the protest in the first place. The GOP was consumed in whole and that was the eventual genesis of Trumpism.
There is another fear in this that goes behind the horror of America’s wealthiest citizens controlling fabricated movements to get their political wishes carried out. Sure, thousands more will die totally preventable deaths, and we could reopen the country far too early and see a total meltdown of our economy and healthcare, but there is more here.
The activities by the Devos’s and Koch’s speaks to a larger, more insidious concern, that of managed democracy. For decades America has interfered in the political affairs of other nations, particularly those considered second or third world nations. America has created fake movements in Iran, Chile, Congo, Vietnam, and god knows how many other countries. It was, and perhaps is, a standard operating procedure for American foreign policy to build up artificial protests and rallies to control reality.
It is a method that has been copied in recent years by Vladimir Putin and Putinist Russia. Following Putin’s rise to power in 2000, the reality in Russia has been continually manipulated by propagandists and technologists. Chief among them is a man named Vladislav Surkov, an operative with a background in theater who has repeatedly created rivals and crises that Putin can best in order to consolidate power and enjoy the illusion of popular authority. Once Russia was sufficiently conquered by these techniques, Putin and Surkov began exporting them around the world.
In 2016, both America and England were victim of these attacks. They were wildly successful and fabricated movements in both countries led to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. These were expressed goals of Putin’s regime, and both were carried out by the mobilization of faux-populist movements. Now, with the Reopen American movement in full gear, it is likely that Russia has been contributing to the misinformation and the propaganda, but it is inarguable that white separatist movements and extremists in America have gotten into the game.
What we are watching is the beginning of manufactured psychological operations with the purpose of twisting reality for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Unfortunately, coverage of the operation is granting it legitimacy as media is incapable of grasping the manipulation without sounding alarmist. It is working. The protests are spreading and it’s impossible to tell now how many of the protests are organic as they are copying the original fake in Michigan or if they are continuing to be funded and pushed by actors hidden in the shadows.
It is enraging and demoralizing, but these manufactured movements work and they endanger our safety and our democracy.
Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.