US Politics

Wall Street’s giants moved to end the US’s spiraling banking crisis on Thursday by agreeing to prop up troubled First Republic, a mid-sized bank whose shares have been pummeled amid a wider banking turmoil.Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and others will deposit $30bn in First Republic, which has seen customers yank their money following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and fears that First Republic could be next.“The actions of America’s largest banks reflect their confidence in the country’s banking system. Together, we are deploying our financial strength and liquidity into the larger system, where it is needed the most,” the banks said in a joint statement on Thursday.The big banks have received billions in deposits from smaller, regional banks as the banking crisis has spooked their customers. US authorities swooped in to take control of SVB and New York’s Signature bank last weekend after frightened customers pulled their deposits.Banks and regulators are hoping that the action will act as a firewall by protecting First Republic and stopping the crisis spreading to other smaller banks.Shares in First Republic – a San Francisco-based bank that largely caters to wealthier clients including Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg – had fallen about 70% since the news of SVB’s collapse. They fell another 22% on Thursday before the bailout but ended the day up nearly 10%.In a joint statement, US treasury secretary Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell and senior regulators said: “This show of support by a group of large banks is most welcome, and demonstrates the resilience of the banking system.”Ahead of the news Yellen assured Congress on Thursday that the US banking system was “sound”.“I can reassure the members of the committee that our banking system is sound, and that Americans can feel confident that their deposits will be there when they need them,” she told the Senate finance committee.SVB had a high percentage of “uninsured” deposits – deposits above the $250,000 government insured limit. SVB’s uninsured deposits accounted for 94% of its total. First Republic’s percentage of uninsured deposits was far lower – at 68% according to S&P Global – but was high enough to worry investors and depositors with more than $250,000 in accounts at the bank.The unprecedented rescue plan will see most of the US’s largest banks making uninsured deposits into First Republic. Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo are each making a $5bn deposit into First Republic. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are each making deposits of $2.5bn, and BNY Mellon, PNC Bank, State Street, Truist and US Bank are each making a deposit of $1bn, for a total deposit from the eleven banks of $30bn.The news came as the Swiss central bank issued a $53.7bn loan to Credit Suisse to stem its own crisis of confidence. The long-troubled bank’s share price had collapsed after its largest shareholder, Saudi National Bank, said it was unable to provide more financing to Credit Suisse. More

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Some of the US’s biggest banks are weighing a rescue bid for First Republic, a mid-sized bank whose shares have been pummeled amid a wider banking turmoil.Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo are among the banks discussing a lifeline for the San Francisco-based lender, according to the Wall Street Journal.The Journal also reported that top executives at the bank had sold millions of dollars in shares in the bank in the two months leading up to its share price collapse. In total insiders have sold $11.8m worth of stock so far this year.First Republic’s shares fell 22% on Thursday morning but bounced back after the news of a possible deal broke. They are down close to 70% over the last five trading days and the bank’s market capitalization has fallen from $21bn on 8 March, when the Silicon Valley Bank ( SVB) crisis began, to less than $5bn.Any deal would need to be passed by regulators and the Journal said the situation was highly uncertain.First Republic, known for its affluent customer base, has been hit hard following the collapse of SVB, which was seized by federal regulators over the weekend.First Republic, like some other regional banks, has a large amounts of uninsured deposits above the $250,000 government insured limit. SVB’s uninsured deposits accounted for 94% of its total. Some 68% of First Republic deposits are uninsured, according to S&P Global, far lower than SVB but high enough to worry investors and depositors.Customers have pulled billions in deposits from the bank and S&P Global Rating downgraded the bank’s credit rating to junk on Tuesday.Over the weekend the bank announced it had secured another $70bn in financing from the Federal Reserve and JP Morgan.“First Republic’s capital and liquidity positions are very strong, and its capital remains well above the regulatory threshold for well-capitalized banks,” Jim Herbert, founder and executive chairman, and Mike Roffler, CEO and president of First Republic, said in a statement.But the announcement appears to have done little to assuage investor and customer fears.SVB’s collapse was the second largest since the collapse of Washington Mutual in 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis. It was accompanied by the failure of New York-based Signature, which also failed after fears about its finances led customers to yank their funds.Speaking to Congress on Thursday, the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said the US banking system remained “sound”.“I can reassure the members of the committee that our banking system is sound, and that Americans can feel confident that their deposits will be there when they need them,” she said.The Fed’s intervention has drawn parallels to the unpopular bailout of Wall Street banks after the 2008 financial crisis. Yellen said the latest rescue efforts were markedly different.“Shareholders and debt holders are not being protected by the government,” she said. “Importantly, no taxpayer money is being used or put at risk with this action.” More

When asked this week whether the UK would ban TikTok on government phones, Rishi Sunak’s response signalled a change in stance: “We look at what our allies are doing.”Previously ministers had seemed sanguine, even saying that whether or not the app stayed on someone’s phone should be a matter of “personal choice”.Not any more. The UK’s allies are turning against TikTok and it was when Sunak said he was watching their actions closely that a government ban became inevitable. The US, Canada and the EU’s executive arm have already decided to strip the app from official devices. It is now a matter of geopolitical choice.TikTok is owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance. The fear among its critics on both sides of the Atlantic is that the Chinese state can access data generated by its more than 1 billion users and manipulate its recommendation algorithm in order to push a China-friendly point of view to unsuspecting users.There is no hard evidence this is the case and TikTok says it would refuse any data request from the Chinese government, although the UK government cited concerns about “the way in which this [user] data may be used” for the ban on Thursday. But tensions over Taiwan, concerns that China will supply weaponry to Russia, the shooting down of a spy balloon that hovered over the US and warnings of state espionage have created a toxic backdrop to those denials. And on Monday a refreshed integrated review of UK defence and foreign policy described China as an “epoch-defining” challenge.TikTok’s reputation was severely damaged last year when ByteDance admitted employees had attempted to use the app to spy on reporters.TikTok will be concerned that Sunak will match each upward ratchet in pressure from his counterparts. On Wednesday the Biden administration demanded the platform’s Chinese owner sell the app or face a complete ban. Will the UK ultimately threaten the same?If geopolitics is the leading factor in these moves, as opposed to hard proof that TikTok poses a security threat, then it is likely every deterioration in relations between China and the west will push the app further along the road to a complete ban or forced divestment from its owners in the UK and elsewhere. Indeed, a forced sale in the US – if the Chinese government lets TikTok’s owners do so – could lead to TikTok being peeled off from ByteDance in its entirety.The shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon off the east coast of the US last month was followed by reports that negotiations between TikTok and the Biden administration over a deal to resolve security concerns had stalled, while this week the White House gave its support to a Senate bill giving the president the power to ban TikTok.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTikTok’s attempts to assuage those concerns – for instance announcing plans to store US and European user data on third-party data servers – seem to have failed with the current American president in the same way they did with his immediate predecessor, who also tried to force a divestment of TikTok’s US business. The backstop used by TikTok’s critics is the existence of Chinese laws that could force ByteDance to cooperate with Beijing authorities, including the national intelligence law of 2017, which states that all organisations and citizens shall “support, assist and cooperate” with national intelligence efforts. For many, this is enough evidence.Perhaps eliminating the concerns over Chinese interference by selling TikTok to non-Chinese investors is the only way to quell the critics. But there are plenty of other aspects of the Chinese tech industry – from Huawei mobile phones to other electronic devices – that are just as capable of eliciting similar fears. Without strong supporting evidence there is no way of knowing how proportionate the UK government is being – and the same could be true for moves against other Chinese tech interests. More

John F. Kennedy, whose ancestors left Ireland during the potato famine of the mid-19th century, was famously the first United States president of Catholic Irish descent.

When Americans narrowly elected Kennedy in 1960, anti-Catholic bias was still part of the mainstream culture.

I am a scholar of Irish literature and the author of “Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History,” a new book that describes how the Irish were long excluded in America.

So when Kennedy accepted shamrocks from the Irish ambassador to the U.S. on his first St. Patrick’s Day in the White House in 1961, it signaled the social and political arrival of the Irish American elite. It also was a pivotal moment, marking Irish Americans’ fulfilled dream of full assimilation into the U.S.

The dream soured when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963. That tragedy – and the many others that followed for the Kennedy family – began to be told by others in the Gothic story tradition, which hinges on nightmarish scenarios and the abuse of power.

This kind of storytelling has shown to be a suitable match for the different narratives of the Kennedys as both innocent victims and wicked schemers.

The phrase “the luck of the Irish” is often used of Irish America, especially on St. Patrick’s Day, observed on March 17. Since it typically refers to good luck, however, it cannot be used of Irish America’s best-known dynasty.

This phrase has various proposed origins, including the success Irish gold miners had in the U.S. in the 1800s.

Irish America’s best-known dynasty might not be described as lucky, but rather as Gothic.

President John F. Kennedy accepts shamrocks from the Ambassador of Ireland, Thomas J. Kiernan, in 1961.
Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

The Kennedys and Gothic

Since its 18th-century beginnings in literature, Gothic storytelling uses a sinister atmosphere of conspiracy and the supernatural. It also generally features an all-powerful Catholic patriarch.

Many other elements repeat over centuries in different classic Gothic works, like “Dracula,” for example. This can include a secret or curse linked to a corrupt bloodline, endangered beautiful women and disrupted inheritance or murdered heirs.

For both sides of America’s political divide, the Kennedys fit the ready-made mold of Gothic, though in different ways.

After JFK’s assassination, liberals and Democrats who had approved of his administration’s progressive policies believed that the idealistic Kennedys were the blameless targets of dark conspiracies.

These conspiracies included persistent questions about who or what was behind JFK’s assassination, even though a former Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested in 1963 and charged in the president’s death. Oswald himself was killed before he could stand trial, feeding the conspiracy theories.

However, for conservatives and Catholic Irish Americans leaving traditional Democratic Party loyalty behind, the family known as “America’s royals” represented the corruption of the elite.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s official portrait, painted in 1970, is similar to some classic portrayals of women in Gothic literature.
White House Collection/White House Historical Association

The Gothic patriarch, Joe Kennedy Sr.

In traditional Gothic fiction, the usual source of such immorality is the all-powerful Catholic elder.

In the Kennedy narrative, that role of Catholic elder is played by the president’s father, Joe Kennedy Sr. He was a wealthy investor and politician. Kennedy family biographers have recorded rumors of shady dealings in his numerous business interests.

In addition, the Kennedy patriarch’s very Gothic ambitions to hereditary rule were repeatedly disrupted.

Joe Sr. strategized to help launch JFK’s political rise only after the first-born he had planned to make president, Joseph Jr., was shot down and killed in action during World War II.

Jackie Kennedy

The Kennedy Gothic narrative also enfolds people who marry into the family.

Joe Sr.‘s daughter-in-law, Jacqueline Kennedy, was filmed clambering over the back of the presidential open-top limousine in a bloodied suit immediately after her husband was shot while being driven in a motorcade. In that moment, she became Gothic’s classic endangered, beautiful woman.

Strikingly, Jackie Kennedy’s eerie official portrait resembles the fleeing woman in a flowing white gown of Gothic paperback cover tradition.

Right after her husband’s assassination, Jackie Kennedy talked about how the Dallas mayor’s wife had given her blood-red roses earlier that day – which she implied was a bad omen of the forthcoming assassination, given the flowers’ color.

In the same interview, Jacqueline used the phrase “Camelot” to refer to the idealism of her husband’s administration.

However, many biographies and media stories in the years that followed painted the picture of a morally complex Kennedy family.

Former First Lady Jackie Kennedy receives red roses shortly before JFK’s assassination in Dallas, Texas.
Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

The Kennedy curse

Some Kennedy men’s sexually promiscuous or otherwise “liberal” behavior with women, for example, got as much press as their liberal politics.

In 1969, a year after Robert Kennedy was assassinated during his presidential run, his brother Ted drove off a bridge in Massachusetts. Ted Kennedy was yet another son of Joe Sr. with ambitions to one day become president.

His 29-year-old passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned after Kennedy left her in the water. He did not report the accident for 10 hours. Ted pleaded guilty in 1969 to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident and later received a two-month suspended jail sentence.

A 1965 mosaic in Galway Cathedral memorializes John F. Kennedy’s visit there in June 1963.
Peter Moore/Author provided, Author provided (no reuse)

Ted later spoke about “some awful curse” playing a role in Kopechne’s death. Ted’s naming of the very Gothic idea of a family curse caught on and became popular lore.

Many observers have subsequently described the family’s tragedies as the result of a curse, especially the 1999 death in an airplane crash of John Jr., JFK’s son and possible political heir.

When the numerous premature deaths of Kennedy family members are tallied, they do appear to be statistically unlikely. But whether the family’s tragedies are the result of mere bad luck or a Gothic family curse remains a matter of open interpretation. More

This week a Republican-appointed federal judge weighed whether to grant an injunction that could remove mifepristone, the drug used in most American abortions, from the market nationwide. And the hearing almost happened in secret.US district court judge Matthew Kacsmaryk had initially planned to keep Wednesday’s hearing in the case – in which a group of rightwing anti-abortion groups are suing the FDA to reverse its 20-year-old approval of mifepristone – quiet. In a conference call with lawyers for the anti-choice groups and the Department of Justice, Kacsmaryk asked attorneys not to disclose the existence of the hearing (“This is not a gag order,” he said repeatedly), and said that the event would only be made public late on Tuesday to minimize popular awareness. “It may even be after business hours.” The judge’s courtroom in Amarillo, Texas, is hours away from any major city. It was only because of a press leak that the hearing was known to the public at all.It was just one of many of the alarming irregularities in the lawsuit, in which Kacsmaryk seems poised to grant the plaintiffs’ wish and issue an injunction that will radically reduce access to abortion nationwide.For one thing, the plaintiffs’ standing is exceptionally shaky: it’s not clear why the collection of abortion opponents – including one doctor, George Delgado, whose attempt to design an abortion-reversal clinical trial sent 25% of the test subjects to the hospital – have standing to sue the FDA. It’s especially unclear why they have standing to sue in Amarillo; the federal judicial district has become a popular venue for rightwing litigation in part because Kacsmaryk, an exceptionally conservative jurist willing to publish poorly reasoned, policy-driven opinions, is the only federal judge there.For another thing, the plaintiffs’ requests are exceptionally far-reaching. The anti-abortion groups want Kacsmaryk to declare the FDA’s approval of mifepristone illegal, even though the drug has been available in the US, and proven to be safe, for more than 20 years, and even though a judicial reversal of FDA approval for a medication would be highly unusual and only dubiously legal. At the hearing on Wednesday, lawyers for the plaintiffs acknowledged that there was no precedent for the court to order the suspension of a long-approved medication. If Kacsmaryk approves the injunction – and all indications are that he will – the drug could become inaccessible nationwide, even in Democratic-controlled states where abortion is legal.For another thing, the plaintiffs’ claims are so profoundly divorced from fact that it is difficult to believe that they are being made in good faith. The anti-abortion groups – including the doctor whose study sent women to the hospital – say that they are challenging the drug because they believe, falsely, that mifepristone is unsafe. Lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom, the rightwing legal outfit that is representing the plaintiffs and which is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, pursued this idea on Wednesday in court. “How many more women have to die?” attorney Erik Baptist asked.In fact, no one dies from mifepristone. One of the most aggressively studied and tested drugs in the world since its creation in France in 1987, mifepristone, which blocks the pregnancy hormone progesterone and stops a pregnancy from progressing, has been found effective and overwhelmingly safe; it has a lower rate of serious complications than Tylenol. One study found that “significant adverse outcomes” occurred in less than 1% (0.65%) of mifepristone patients; the most common of these was continued pregnancy.What women do die from – died from in massive numbers before Roe, and will die from again, if medication abortion becomes unavailable – is illegal surgical abortions.Since Dobbs, the abortion rights movement has correctly been aiming to de-stigmatize illegal, self-managed abortions, encouraging women to stock up on the pills in advance so that they have them if they need them. The idea was that women shouldn’t be scared to use the pills: mifepristone, taken together with the contraction-inducing drug misoprostol, is so overwhelmingly safe and effective that women who could access the pills could confidently and secretly manage their own abortions, even in ban states. But if medication abortion becomes inaccessible, women may attempt more dangerous methods to self-induce. This is the real reason anti-abortion groups are targeting mifepristone: not because it endangers women, but because it keeps them safe.The injunction doesn’t necessarily have to end medication abortion in America as we know it. For one thing, there are already groups, both foreign and domestic, that are mailing abortion medication, including mifepristone, to all 50 states, regardless of local law. Women’s solidarity, inventiveness and determination will always outmatch punitive anti-abortion regimes. For another, an established misoprostol-only protocol for abortion has already been proven effective.Some abortion providers have already signaled their intention to switch to misoprostol-only; the drug is available over the counter in Mexico. But though they are effective, misoprostol-only abortions are also significantly more painful than those conducted with mifepristone. For the anti-abortion groups in court, that’s likely part of the point.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

Twenty years ago, Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski was working as a desk officer in the Pentagon, when she became aware of a secretive new department called the Office of Special Plans.The OSP had been set up to produce the kind of intelligence that the Bush administration wanted to hear, about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Kwiatkowski, then age 42, saw first-hand how the disastrous war was confected.“I had this huge faith in my superiors, that they must be there for a reason, they must be wise and strong and all of these fairytale type things, but I came to find out there are very incompetent people in very high positions,” she said.Kwiatkowski, who became a Pentagon whistleblower over the war, is now a farmer, part-time college professor, and occasional political candidate on the libertarian end of the Republican party in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. She says she was somewhat cynical about war and politics even before she was seconded to the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia department in 2002. But seeing America’s governance subverted up close dramatically deepened her disillusion.“There’s a crisis of faith in this country,” Kwiatkowski said. “As always, when you have these crises of faith you see populist leaders, and the emergence of Trump certainly was a response to a crisis in faith. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next, because Americans have a lot less to be proud of than we think.”On the whole, she believes the experience of the Iraq war has imbued Americans with a healthy scepticism about what they are being told by the establishment – but not nearly enough.“I could go into the Walmart right now and ask everybody about WMD in Iraq and probably three out ten people, maybe more, will swear that it’s all true,” she said. “Our public propaganda in this country is supremely good.”Polling figures over the past two decades suggest that overall attitudes towards foreign policy are fairly stable. When the Chicago Council on Global Affairs asked Americans whether “it will be best for the future of the country if we take an active part in world affairs or if we stay out of world affairs”, 71% supported activism in 2002 and 64% still supported it in 2021.More generally, the Iraq invasion coincided with a collapse in public trust in government which had very briefly recovered from its post-Vietnam slump after the 9/11 attacks. Data from surveys by the Pew Research Centre, show the post-Iraq malaise is deeper and more enduring.“It said first and foremost to young people that the government can’t be trusted,” John Zogby, another US pollster, said. “It also said that the American military may be the strongest in the world but it has serious limits, and it can’t impose its will, even on smaller countries.”He added: “Americans will go to war, but they want their wars to be short, and they want them to make a positive difference.”There are still US soldiers on counter-terrorist missions in Iraq and Syria. The Authorisation to Use Military Force that Congress first granted to the Bush administration in the run-up to the 2003 invasion has yet to be repealed by the Senate, and has been cited by the Obama and Trump administrations in justifying operations in the region.Coleen Rowley, an FBI whistleblower who exposed security lapses leading to the 9/11 attacks, wrote an open letter to the FBI director in March 2003, warning of a “flood of terrorism” resulting from the Iraq invasion. She says now that two decades on, nobody has been held accountable for the fatal mistakes.“I think the real danger is that their propaganda was very successful, and people like Bush and Cheney have now been rehabilitated,” Rowley said. “Even the liberals have embraced Bush and Cheney.”The terrible mistakes made leading to and during the Iraq war forced no resignations and neither George W Bush nor his vice-president, Dick Cheney – nor any other senior official who made the case the war and then oversaw a disastrous occupation – have ever been held to account by any form of commission or tribunal.However, the taint of Iraq arguably altered the course of US politics by hobbling those who supported it.“In some ways you can argue Iraq is what led to Obama being president as opposed to Hillary Clinton,” said Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher school of law and diplomacy at Tufts University. “I don’t think Obama wins the 2008 Democratic primary if Hillary hadn’t supported the war.”The war also opened a schism in the Republican party, strengthening an anti-intervention faction that eventually triumphed with the 2016 election of Donald Trump.George W Bush and his former vice-president have drawn some positive liberal press for their low-key opposition to some of the excesses of the Trump era, but Kenneth Pollack, a Middle East and military expert at the American Enterprise Institute, they paid a political price by becoming marginalised within their own party.“The system has punished those people. If you were a Bushie, if you were a neocon, you’re no longer welcome to the party,” Pollack said. “I would say there has been a lot of accountability, but it’s been accountability in a traditionally American way.”Those excluded included traditional conservatives with less extreme domestic social positions than Maga Republicans. The drive to war was fueled by partisanship – the Bush administration was contemptuous of Democrats and all opposition – but it also served as an accelerant to the extremism that led to Trump and the 6 January insurrection.“It’s very hard to say how much Iraq was responsible for that, but it does seem to me that it was an important element in making our partisanship worse,” Pollack said.Pollack is a former CIA analyst and a Democrat who backed the invasion, believing the evidence on Saddam Hussein’s WMD and supporting the humanitarian argument for ousting a dictator.Pollack jokes that he is the only person to have since apologised. It is not entirely true as a few other pundits, like the conservative commentator, Max Boot, have also been contrite, but there have been no public expressions of remorse from former senior officials who took the fateful decisions. It is one of the important ways in which the US has still not had a proper reckoning for the war.Pollack, who has stayed in touch with several of the Bush team for a forthcoming book on the US and Iraq, said that some express private regret for specific decisions and choices, but others remain unrepentant.“I’ve heard it said to my face that: ‘Nope, I wouldn’t change a thing. I’d do everything all over again the exact same way’, which I find shocking,” he said. “I don’t see how you look at American behaviour during this period and not have regrets.” More

As Russia’s ruthless war against Ukraine has faced major setbacks since it began a year ago, the Kremlin has deployed new disinformation themes and tactics to weaken US support for Kyiv with help from conservative media stars and some Republicans in Congress, according to new studies and experts.Moscow’s disinformation messages have included widely debunked conspiracy theories about US bioweapon labs in Ukraine, and pet themes on the American right that portray the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as an ally in backing traditional values, religion and family in the fight against “woke” ideas.Further, new studies from thinktanks that track disinformation have noted that alternative social media platforms such as Parler, Rumble, Gab and Odysee have increasingly been used to spread Russian falsehoods since Facebook and Twitter have imposed more curbs on Moscow’s propaganda.Other pro-Russian messages focused on the economic costs of the war for the US have been echoed by Republicans in the powerful far-right House Freedom Caucus such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Scott Perry and Paul Gosar, who to varying degrees have questioned giving Ukraine more military aid and demanded tougher oversight.Since Russia launched its invasion last February, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Trump ally – turned influential far-right podcaster – Steve Bannon have promoted some of the most baseless claims that help bolster the Kremlin’s aggression.For instance, Bannon’s War Room podcast in February 2022 featured an interview with Erik Prince, the wealthy US founder of Blackwater, where they both enthused that Putin’s policies were “anti-woke” and praised Putin’s homophobia and transphobia.Last month too on the anniversary of Moscow’s invasion, Carlson revved up his attacks on US support for Ukraine claiming falsely that Biden’s goal had become “overthrowing Putin and putting American tanks in Red Square because, sure, we could manage Russia once we overthrow the dictator”.Analysts who track Russia’s disinformation see synergies between the Kremlin and parts of the US right that have helped spread some of the biggest falsehoods since the start of the invasion.“Russia doesn’t pull even its most outlandish narratives out of thin air – it builds on existing resentments and political fissures,” Jessica Brandt, a policy director at the Brookings Institution who tracks disinformation and foreign interference, told the Guardian.She added: “So you often have a sort of harmony – both Kremlin messengers and key media figures, each for their own reasons, have an interest in dinging the administration for its handling of the Ukraine crisis, in amplifying distrust of authoritative media, in playing on skepticism about the origins of Covid and frustration with government mitigation measures.”“That was the case with the biolabs conspiracy theory, for example, which posits that the Pentagon has been supporting the development of biological weapons in Ukraine. The Charlie Kirk Show and Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, among others, devoted multiple segments to the claim. It’s not so much that we’re witnessing any sort of coordination, but rather an alignment of interests.”Brandt also noted that Russia had an “interest in promoting authentic American voices expressing views that align with the Kremlin’s foreign policy goals. And that’s why you often see them retweet Americans that make these arguments.”Likewise, two reports issued separately last month by the Alliance for Securing Democracy and the Atlantic Council, reveal how Russian state media have shifted some messaging themes and adopted new tactics with an eye to undercutting US backing for Ukraine.The Alliance report documented a shift in messaging in the US and Europe from directly defending Russia’s invasion to stressing the energy and economic impacts that it was having, themes that seem to be resonating with some Republican politicians.In the first six months of the war, Alliance data revealed that Russia-linked accounts on Twitter mentioned “Nazi” in more than 5,800tweets.But in the following six months from August 2022 through January 2023, “the number of ‘Nazi’ tweets dropped to 3,373 – a 42% decline”. Likewise, mentions of Nato by Russian-linked accounts on Twitter dropped by roughly 30% in the second six-month period.By contrast, in the most recent six-month period the report said that “tweets mentioning both ‘energy’ and ‘Ukraine’ increased by 267%, while tweets mentioning ‘cost of living’ increased 66%” compared to the first six months of the war.In another twist, Bret Schafer, who leads the Alliance’s information manipulation team, told the Guardian: “In response to restrictions and crackdowns by major tech platforms, accounts and channels affiliated with Russian state media outlet RT, which has been banned entirely on YouTube, have fanned out across alternative social media and video sharing platforms like Rumble and Odysee that have less restrictive content moderation policies and that allow RT to operate without labels or restrictions.“Those platforms also tend to cater to audiences who are not necessarily pro-Russian, but are certainly more apt, based on the other videos found on those platforms, to oppose continued support for Ukraine.”Despite Moscow’s disinformation offensive and the $100bn plus in military and financial assistance that has flowed to Ukraine in one year, the ex-Republican House member Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania said that “most GOP members still support Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression”.But Dent stressed that “the hardest edge of the Bannon-Carlson wing of the Maga movement in Congress is more sympathetic to Russian arguments and has an isolationist view of American foreign policy. There are some members who are less willing to push back against autocrats. There are others too who find common cause with Russia’s professed socially conservative orientation.”Those voices are especially loud in the Freedom Caucus which is wielding growing influence with the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who has said he will not support a “blank check” for Ukraine and this week declined the invitation of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to visit Kyiv.Freedom Caucus member Greene from Georgia at the recent CPAC conference said flatly: “We’ve done enough.”Democrats are especially worried about the embrace of pro-Kremlin disinformation by the American right.The Democratic senator Chris Murphy blasted US conservatives for echoing Kremlin propaganda and traced its roots back to ex-president Donald Trump, who at the start of Russia’s invasion lauded Putin as “savvy” and a “genius”. Murphy said Trump’s “admiration for Putin” has “turned into a collective rightwing obsession”.Murphy noted that among the obsessed on the right are Donald Trump Jr, whom he follows on social media, and who is “relentlessly making fun of Zelenskiy online”.Meanwhile, Putin’s own words and propaganda have lately shifted as he has tried to influence opinion in the US and the west, and blunt Russian dissent.“Millions of people in the west understand they are being led to a real spiritual catastrophe,” Putin railed last month in a wildly hyperbolic speech that homed in on “the destruction of families”, and related themes.Russia experts warn that Putin’s rhetoric and Kremlin messaging on these themes is far removed from the reality in Russia.“One of the glaring mistakes of far-right propagandists is to view Vladimir Putin as some kind of defender of Christendom, of family values and as a protector of the white race,” said Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “They repeat the Kremlin talking points and get excited about the Russian ‘gay propaganda’ law. Nothing could be further from reality.“Today Russia is the leader in Europe of high divorce rates, HIV infections, and low church attendance and practice.”Senator Murphy expects Putin to count “on the [American] right wing to advance Russian propaganda and exploit our internal divisions.” More