On Feb. 16, Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced an indictment accusing 13 Russian individuals and three Russian organizations of interfering with American politics.
When I first saw the news, I felt a sense of vindication rising up in me. At last, the truth would be revealed, and justice would be served! Then I read the news articles and the full text of the indictment, and my stomach dropped. My sense of self-righteousness was replaced with a sense of embarrassment as I was convicted of my own contributions to the scandal.
According to the indictment, since around 2014, certain Russian individuals and organizations have had “a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” The suspected interference in the 2016 election has now been revealed as a much larger operation. The actions of the defendants uncovered by Mueller’s investigations began around 2014, before any campaigning for the 2016 election had taken place. Their goal apparently was not to have a certain individual elected to office, but to turn us against each other.
Pretending to be American citizens, the defendants shared divisive comments about Trump and Clinton on social media, bought political advertisements, organized rallies through social media, and encouraged minority groups to vote for a third party candidate.
When the election was over, they didn’t stop. “After the election of Donald Trump in or around November 2016,” the indictment continues, “Defendants and their co-conspirators used false U.S. personas to organize and coordinate U.S. political rallies in support of then president-elect Trump, while simultaneously using other false U.S. personas to organize and coordinate U.S. political rallies protesting the results of the 2016 presidential election.” Taking advantage of heightened emotions in our country following the election, the defendants creatively and effectively turned us against each other.
Rather than patching the rifts between us, we’ve turned them into foxholes to shoot at each other from. At first, I resisted this. I held to hope and the power of dialogue. But the rifts grew wider and deeper until I felt myself being sucked into them and eventually stopped resisting.
It makes me sick to think that I saw posts and advertisements created by foreign actors invested not in my vote, but in my rage. To think that I may have attended a march or rally organized as a manipulative means to get me to contribute to our country’s discord is terrifying.
I was duped. We all were.
We bought into the propaganda strategically placed by people on the other side of the globe. We grabbed our torches and pitch forks and went after each other. We turned our brothers and sisters with different opinions than us into the enemy. We erased the option of being a moderate, forcing our fellow citizens to pick a side, and then villainizing and attacking those who picked incorrectly.
How did I let this happen? How did I erase the faces of those who voted differently than I did in November, choosing only to see which bubble they filled in on their ballots? How did I forget the command to love our neighbors as ourselves? How did I forget that the Samaritan – that person whom I love to hate because of our differences – is the neighbor I am commanded to love?
It is embarrassing and sickening and convicting to suddenly see the other side of the one-way mirror and realize that you were part of an experiment this whole time. Being a pawn in an experiment does not absolve us of our divisiveness. There would still be arguments and violence and rallies and marches whether orchestrated by foreign hands or not. But being a pawn allows us to know first-hand the consequences of the experiment. Not only have we have seen the statistics of hatred drawn up in a graph, but we have perpetuated hatred and been victims of it.
So, what now? As we await the court’s response to this indictment and the findings of further investigations, we have some work to do here at home. We cannot point a finger of blame at Russia without acknowledging our own participation in their work. Rather than sit still waiting for the news to tell us that blame has been assigned and we have been vindicated (as I have been doing), we need to get up and start fighting, not against each other, but with each other for peace.
We need to climb out of our foxholes and start patching the rifts we helped dig.
