America’s Democracy Is in the Fight of Its Life

In a chilling op-ed in this morning’s Washington Post, Evelyn N. Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia who is presently running for Congress, describes the cynical, phony, Putin-style, extreme right-wing tactics mounted against her. “In President Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” she writes, “disinformation and intimidation tactics are commonly used to silence domestic opposition. . . False allegations, followed by contradictory, also false, narratives are the norm in Russian media and political discourse. . . In Trump’s America, similar tactics are taking hold.”

Trump and his allies aren’t content with telling bald-faced lies, they are constructing elaborate false constructions of recent and current history, dressing them up with phony investigations, and disseminating them with mock outrage in a full-court press assault on truth, decency, and fairness. This year, like no other, our democracy is fighting for its life.