What Trump’s win means for US capital

While Donald Trump is offering tax cuts and deregulation, some of his other policies are not as straightforwardly in the ruling class' interest

Elon Musk has been a large funder of Trump’s campaign

 (Photo: flickr/Trump White House Archived)

By Alex Callinicos
Monday 18 November 2024

SOCIALIST WORKER Issue


Now the immediate shock of Donald Trump’s victory has worn off, there’s much anxious speculation about what he will actually do. A lot of attention has naturally focused on the appointments he’s announcing.

In his first administration Trump sought to reassure the core ruling class—the big transnational corporations and banks and the national security apparatus that keeps the world safe for them. He filled his cabinet largely from their ranks. This time no more Rinos—“Republicans in Name Only”. Trump is determined to appoint only those who are personally and politically loyal to him. Hence the parade of anti-vaxxers, dodgy Congresspeople, ultra-Zionists and frackers. Their records and views are pretty scary.

But the situation is more complex and contradictory than it seems. Last time, Trump had to reassure the core ruling class because his social base lay elsewhere. It consisted of capitalists who had got rich tapping the domestic market and often the US state—for example by running care homes.

This time, however, the core ruling class was split. Tesla boss Elon Musk, previously a Democrat, led a big chunk of Silicon Valley money into the Trump camp. Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the investment company Blackstone, fell out with Trump over the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. But he endorsed him this time. Meanwhile, Trump has maintained cordial relations with arguably the most powerful capitalist in the world, Larry Fink, boss of the even bigger investment company BlackRock.

Trump is offering these corporate titans more of the red meat he gave them last time—tax cuts and deregulation. But some of his other policies are not so straightforwardly in their interests. Big US capital operates globally, but Trump wants to raise more barriers with the rest of the world.

One of his headline promises is to expel “illegal” migrants. But Goldman Sachs estimates that immigration has boosted the US workforce by more than 4 million since 2023.

This “helped rebalance the labour market with little economic cost”. Investment bank Morgan Stanley warns that “a curtailment of immigration will force slower growth and higher inflation”.

The higher tariffs on imports that Trump is threatening would disrupt the transnational supply networks on which capitalist production depends today. Despite Musk’s embarrassing far right posturing he is the boss of a global electric vehicle company that has factories in China and Germany.

His tweet praising the ultra free market libertarian Argentinian president Javier Milei for cutting tariffs suggests he isn’t entirely comfortable with Trump’s trade policy.

Another complication concerns the workings of US politics. It’s true that the Republicans now control all branches of government—the presidency, both houses of Congress and the supreme court.

But the US state functions to achieve two results. First, to ensure that elected officials of both parties serve big capital and, second, to allow rival corporate interests to lobby and bargain their way to the best outcomes for them. This is why Fink said it “really doesn’t matter” who won the election.

Trump has to operate this system, which often works agonisingly slowly. He knows this, which is why he is looking for ways to bypass Congress. Ash Merton writes on the New Left Review website, “Trump’s second term looks set to replay a familiar pattern.” This is where “his grandest promises come up against the practical difficulties of mediating between rival interest groups and their political representatives, both inside and outside the administration”.

“During his first stint in office, this dynamic forced him into a series of retreats and compromises, which he attributed to ‘deep state’ sabotage, deflecting the blame onto this shadowy enemy. The next four years will be characterised by a similar attempt at displacement.”

Nevertheless, because he’s been through it before, Trump will try to show his base things will be different this time. Most likely, he’ll start with what he calls “the largest deportation operation in American history”. This could unleash untold suffering. The left in the US and the rest of the world need to prepare to resist.

Trade expert warns UK must choose between EU and Trump

Basit Mahmood 

Yesterday

Left Foot Forward

Trump, who is a protectionist, has said that he plans on introducing a 20% levy on most imports to the US in order to help out domestic businesses, with 60% on imports from China

.

After President-elect Trump made clear his intentions to engage in a trade war and impose tariffs on all imports, which would harm the UK economy, a former world trade expert has warned that the UK must now choose between the EU and the U.S. if it is to grow its economy.

Trump, who is a protectionist, has said that he plans on introducing a 20% levy on most imports to the US in order to help out domestic businesses, with 60% on imports from China.

According to analysis from the Centre for Economics and Business Research, those plans will mean a hit of £20bn to the UK economy, amounting to a reduction in the UK’s economic output by 0.9 per cent by the end of his presidency.

With economic growth a priority for Keir Starmer’s government, some have been pushing him to adopt closer ties with the EU in order to counter balance any economic hit from Trump’s plans.

The former head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Pascal Lamy, has said that it is clear that the UK’s interests lay in staying close to the EU on trade, rather than allying with Trump, not least because it does three times more trade with Europe than the US.

His comments came after an adviser to Trump warned that the UK should align itself with the American “free enterprise” economic model instead of the “more socialist” European system.

In an interview with the Observer, Lamy said: “It’s an old question with a new relevance given Brexit and given Trump. In my view the UK is a European country. Its socio- economic model is much closer to the EU social model and not the very hard, brutal version of capitalism of Trump and [Elon] Musk.

“We can expect that Trump plus Musk will go even more in this direction. If Trump departs from supporting Ukraine, I have absolutely no doubt that the UK will remain on the European side.

“In trade matters, you have to look at the numbers. The trade relationship between the UK and Europe is three times larger than between the UK and US.”

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

They Say There’s Never Been a Man Like Donald Trump in American Politics. But There Was—and We Should Learn From Him.

Zachary D. Carter
Wed, October 16, 2024

The story of Georgia’s political firebrand Tom Watson will never be a defining national myth. Its extraordinary implications for American democracy notwithstanding, Watson’s life is saturated with too much tragedy to qualify for the righteous optimism demanded by the national canon. When Watson’s statue was removed from the steps of the Georgia state Capitol in 2013, the event went virtually unnoticed outside Atlanta. Without historian C. Vann Woodward’s transcendent 1938 biography, Watson would have surely disappeared even from academic study, like most politicians of his era.

But Watson’s life retains an unsettling power that, once encountered, inescapably colors interpretations of the American past and present. Watson was the most charismatic leader of the late-19th-century political thunderclap that came to be known as American populism, and his story resonates with the full promise and peril of the American project—he can be understood without exaggeration as the heroic scion of the Boston Tea Party and the fevered progenitor of Donald Trump’s violent fantasies.

Born to slave-owning Confederate parents, Watson watched his family descend into poverty after the Civil War, and rose to prominence in Georgia politics as a lawyer and newspaperman who assailed the prevailing economic order. Watson accurately described Gilded Age political rule as a predatory alliance of Southern political bosses and Northern capitalists. As the 1880s turned to the 1890s, Watson came to understand racial division as an essential tool of this bipartisan system—one that elites in both parties inflamed to weaken the political power of Black and white working people by turning them against each other. He ran for Congress as a member of the independent People’s Party, winning support from prominent Black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, with his pledge to erase America’s “color line” in pursuit of agrarian liberation. The radicalism of the People’s Party is easily obscured by the fact that so many of its early demands were eventually enacted, from an eight-hour workday to free mail delivery to a progressive income tax. But the most extraordinary aspect of the Populist Party was its coalition. When Georgia police arrested Black voting rights activist H.S. Doyle on the streets of Augusta ahead of the 1892 election, one of Watson’s henchmen sprang Doyle from prison and sheltered him at Watson’s estate, where more than 2,000 members of the People’s Party armed themselves to successfully defend Doyle from a state-backed lynch mob.

But Watson eventually lost his 1892 campaign, and the populist movement that had gripped the country disintegrated within a few years. By the early 20th century, the party was gone, and Watson had transformed himself from a prophet of racial cooperation into a fountain of white-hot racial resentment. He endorsed the complete disenfranchisement of Black voters, ranted against Catholics and socialists, and eventually used his newspaper to incite a lynch mob into murdering Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank.

Watson’s embrace of the dark side brought him his greatest electoral success. When he died in 1922, Watson was a United States senator from Georgia, representing the very Democratic Party he once denounced.

Watson was an effective demagogue because he practiced a politics of anger in an era that demanded it. Even at his most inspiring—and his losing 1892 campaign was an intoxicating cultural phenomenon—Watson didn’t so much promise to help as fight. He had a policy platform, but he was also operating an economic cooperative and very nearly an armed rebellion. Throughout the Gilded Age, workers and farmers really were being exploited by a predatory oligarchy. The political system was indeed thoroughly corrupt, and the economy was a system of mass deprivation marked by financial crises, endless deflation, agricultural mismanagement, mechanized industrial cruelty, and child labor. People had a right to be angry.

Today’s global economy is for the most part gentler, but a similar politics of anger has returned. The 2008 financial crisis distilled a sense that the game was rigged against ordinary people. The federal government saved banker bonuses and shrugged off financial fraud as unemployment soared to 10 percent and more than 9 million homes were lost to foreclosure. The wealthiest one percent of American households captured half the economic gains across Barack Obama’s presidency, and by the close of 2015, the bottom 99 percent had recovered only about two-thirds of the income it had lost during the crash.

It’s not hard to understand how a politics of anger can be mobilized when the political system fails ordinary people while taking extraordinary measures to protect the wealthy. What is more difficult to process is how that anger has been sustained over the past eight years.

The unemployment rate was below 5 percent for all but the final nine months of Donald Trump’s presidency and for all but the first six months of Joe Biden’s. For context, the unemployment rate never moved below 5 percent between January 1974 and April 1997. And while nobody enjoyed the bout of inflation that set in between 2021 and 2022, worker wage gains have outpaced price increases since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inflation peaked at 7.2 percent in June 2022—but inflation was actually higher across the entire first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (followed by nine consecutive months of double-digit unemployment) without a populist uprising. The U.S. labor market hasn’t been as robust as it is today in 50 years, and even accounting for inflation, the overall economic performance of the past two years has been the best since at least the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency. The U.S. economy is not without problems; housing is too expensive, for instance, and just about everything associated with being a parent has become extremely difficult. But it just isn’t true that the nation’s political system has been ignoring the plight of ordinary workers. It has responded quite vigorously to their needs in the form of repeated multi-trillion-dollar investments in domestic industry and direct household support.

Nevertheless, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance will almost certainly secure the votes of nearly half the American electorate this November, deploying a campaign of vicious dishonesty that would make Sen. Watson proud. This isn’t a populist campaign in any meaningful economic sense; Trump’s vow to repeal Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, is a promise to renege on more than $1 trillion in American manufacturing. But it remains a campaign predicated on anger. At the recent vice presidential debate, Vance repeatedly squeezed anti-immigrant vitriol into his economic commentary—claiming that illegal immigration was “one of the most significant drivers of home prices in this country” (a transparently ludicrous explanation for the post-COVID rise in home prices, which was produced not by a mass influx of foreigners but by the dislocations of the pandemic). One week, Trump and Vance are roiling Springfield, Ohio, with preposterous lies about immigrants eating pets; the next, they’re inventing fables about the government diverting disaster-relief aid to undocumented workers and ranting about immigrants bringing “bad genes” into the country. Occasionally Trump or Vance pays lip service to a policy idea for a few hours—not even their most fervent supporters pretend to care—before getting back to the campaign’s main business of bashing immigrants.

Why on earth would such madness get political traction? For many liberals, the answer is simply that the country is riddled with racism, a response that is both true and trivial. Racism has bedeviled this continent for centuries, but demagogues who seek power through raw resentment fail all the time. New York Mayor Eric Adams has been trying to pin the city’s troubles on migrants for years now, and everybody hates him. Pat Buchanan and David Duke tried to do the same thing in the 1990s and couldn’t win over their own party. Watson’s story shows that, for a time, the right leader could inspire even ex-Confederates to literally fight on behalf of Black voting rights.

Something important happened at the end of Trump’s presidency and the beginning of Joe Biden’s. Nobody wants to talk about it—not even conservatives bring up masks and school closures anymore, and much of the discourse surrounding inflation studiously avoids reference to the massive economic disruption of COVID-19. But one of the most important cultural artifacts of the period is the sudden spread of vaccine skepticism to the cultural mainstream. The anti-vaxxer delusion that vaccines cause autism has lingered at the fringes of the autism community in no small part because it provides narrative meaning to a difficult and random experience. There is tremendous joy in the life of a special needs parent, but there is also a great deal of fear and pain. Fear, because you do not know how the world will respond to your child, and pain, because you must watch your child struggle for no fault of their own. For many, it is more comforting to believe that their child’s hardships are not a random act of fate but a product of deliberate malfeasance. The idea that bad things happen for bad reasons is more palatable than the belief that they happen for no reason at all.

It is not only anti-vaxxers who seek such comfort. Americans on both the left and the right avert their eyes from the story of Tom Watson not only because the story is ugly and violent but because we insist on being able to control our own destiny. From Huck Finn to Indiana Jones, American mythology tends to write its heroes as variations on the story of David and Goliath—tales of underdogs who secure unlikely triumphs against an overbearing order. Even when that order is part of America itself, individual heroism soothes the audience with the promise that the world’s wrongs can be righted with enough derring-do. Horatio Alger’s novels of children born into poverty could be read as an indictment of the Gilded Age social order, but the romance of these stories always lies in a boy taking fate by the horns. Watson disturbs us not only because he turns to evil but because an extraordinary leader’s earnest, Herculean attempt to right the world’s wrongs comes up short. To win, he assents to the dominion of dark forces beyond his control.

By the time the peak of the pandemic had passed, Joe Biden was too old to provide his country with the leadership that might have helped it process the tragedy it experienced in 2020 and 2021. One of Biden’s unique gifts as a public communicator has always been his ability to translate his experience with personal tragedy into public consolation—at his best, he is a remarkably empathetic orator, capable of connecting with people from wildly different walks of life through the common experience of pain. But he didn’t, or couldn’t, do that in his 80s. By the end of his presidency, Biden was holed up in the White House with his family, assiduously denying both political reality and his own fate.

We all lost something in the pandemic, but the nation has never mourned those losses in any meaningful collective manner. A politics of anger is not a particularly clean fit for an era of fear and pain, but for millions of Americans, it is a more comforting substitute than a politics of hope.

How 2020's trauma created Trump's death cult

Thom Hartmann

ALTERNET
October 8, 2024 

New York public workers opposed to the city's vaccine mandate protest on October 25, 2021(AFP)

Could the Covid disaster of 2020 — which Trump botched so badly that America has had more Covid deaths than any other nation in the world except Peru (whose president denied Covid was dangerous) — be what’s fueling the Trump MAGA cult? Are we, in other words, as a nation suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and that’s driving a national mental illness crisis that opened the door for Trump’s cult to grow?

— Colorado elections worker Tina Peters, for example, was just sent to prison for nine years for her role in trying to subvert the 2020 election; she’d completely bought into Trump’s lie that Democrats had stolen that election and is paying for it with the rest of her life.

— My barber was telling me this past weekend about how one of his regulars is stocking up on guns, ammunition, and dried food in anticipation of a second Civil War. This guy is now fully in the Trump cult and is thus perfectly willing to kill his neighbors for politics, once somebody declares the war is now underway (as many of these guys expect Trump to do in the next few weeks).


— All across America, families are being torn apart by the Trump cult, and sometimes the conflicts even lead to violence.


The rest of the world has figured this out. Over at the British newspaper The Independent, the headline says it all:

“She Escaped the Religious Sect She Grew Up In. Now She Says Trump’s MAGA Movement is Eerily Similar”

Although the economy right now is doing better than at any time since the 1960s, polls show a majority of Americans would rather believe Trump’s lies that inflation is still with us (it’s down to 1.7 percent now) and the historically low 4.1 percent unemployment rate is “fake news.” And tens of millions of Americans believe him.

So, what’s going on here in America? How did we get here and why?

Many otherwise normal and sane Americans seem to have gone nuts, leaping down the Qanon or Fox “News” rabbit holes in search of meaning, safety, and explanations for the feelings of doom that they just can’t shake. It’s as if some major event in their lives has created such a trauma that they’ve been knocked off balance, psychologically.


And that may be a big part of the answer, particularly given how neither our insurance industry nor our government-funded health insurance programs typically pay for mental health services that might otherwise help out people suffering from trauma-induced shock.

I still remember when I was on a flight out of New York in the late 1970s. Back then, planes took off in the middle of thunderstorms (and occasionally crashed as a result), and this 727 did exactly that. As we were climbing out through what was probably around 4,000 feet the plane was hit by a lightning strike, lighting up the cabin and killing at least one of the engines.

We started to fall out of the sky as the pilots struggled to stabilize the aircraft and restart the engine: the woman sitting next to me grabbed my arm and started sobbing; we all thought we were going to die. I was then (and still am) a licensed pilot and it scared me more than her, I’m guessing, because I knew full well everything that could go wrong to a plane in a thunderstorm, from the lightning strike taking out the jet’s electronics and engines to wind shear ripping us out of the sky. (It’s why they no longer fly through thunderstorms.)


It was at least a decade before I could get on a commercial plane without getting drunk first: That’s what untreated PTSD can do to you. (I finally did EMDR on it and am now fine on airplanes; this was a mild case, and didn’t lead me into a cult.)

Consider some of the cardinal symptoms of PTSD, something that’s often brought on by a near-death-experience, severe abuse, or surviving a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Each symptom would make a person more vulnerable to the siren song of Trump’s cult:


-— Hypervigilance and threat sensitivity, causing people to experience heightened alertness to potential and often imagined (like Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants) threats.
— Difficulty with trust, which may lead to skepticism of official sources and greater reliance on alternative information channels; vulnerability, in other words, to Trump’s lies and his claims of “fake news” when he’s fact-checked.
— Emotional dysregulation, making individuals like Tina Peters, the hundreds of January 6th rioters now in jail, and other Trump followers more vulnerable to emotionally-charged misinformation and MAGA cult membership.
— Cognitive changes impacting critical thinking skills needed to evaluate information that might contradict the lies Trump and his co-conspirators promulgate.
— Social isolation which may limit exposure to different perspectives and fact-checking from others who try to tell MAGA members how deluded and exploited they really are.
— Seeking explanations causing people to have a heightened need to understand and make sense of their experiences, making them more open to MAGA’s anti-science and politically charged explanatory narratives, even when they’re lies.
— Avoidance behaviors leading people to avoid exposure to diverse information sources, keeping them trapped in Trump cult bubbles like rightwing hate radio and Fox “News.”

Multiple studies have been done on the psychological impact of the Covid pandemic, finding anywhere from 5 to 55 percent of Americans suffering in a way that could be diagnosed as PTSD. The average across the studies find 26 percent of Americans having diagnosable PTSD from Covid.

Prior to the pandemic, the national rate of diagnosable PTSD was generally considered to be around 3.5 percent: Clearly, the pandemic had an impact on our psyches that Trump has been exploiting every day since.


Remember, for almost an entire year, we were afraid that just going to the grocery store could kill us. Over a million of us — one out of every 272 Americans — died because of Trump’s incompetence and malice.

Most of us knew people who died; my best friend, Jerry Schneiderman, succumbed to the disease as did several other people close to our family. This is trauma writ large, setting millions up to believe any random BS a cult leader like Trump decides to dish out.

As the lead author of a new study on the impact of Covid, Dr. Jeff Ashby, noted:

“While many people are insulated from deaths and economic hardships related to the pandemic, there is a universal experience of fear, concern for others, and social isolation. Among our findings is that the experience of COVID-19 is a traumatic stress. It isn’t just triggering earlier trauma, it’s a traumatic experience in and of itself.”

Literally millions of people have joined Trump’s cult — it is a cult, as its members are so impervious to factual information and it’s based on the personality of a single man — and the evidence suggests that many of them may have been made vulnerable to joining MAGA because of the trauma they experienced during the worst of the pandemic.

As Dr. Stephen Schwartz wrote for the National Library of Medicine:
“[T]his [million-plus Covid] death rate is directly correlated to the politicization and weaponization of anti-science throughout the MAGA world created by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. … Anti-vaxxers, and anti-maskers, usually the same people, have made fidelity to a fact-free but emotionally satisfying reality more important than life itself, and created the first American death cult. …

“There was a deliberate plan from the very outbreak of the Covid pandemic to take what should have been a fringe movement — there were the equivalent of anti-vaxxers in the Middle Ages with the Plague; there were anti-vaxxers with the 1918 Spanish Flu — and transform it into a mainstream political movement. What had been fringe became a death culture involving millions. Believers willingly subject themselves to a vastly higher risk of contracting and dying of Covid. And they do this in the face of a million dead, and 2000 people, or more, dying each day.”

The good news is that the way most cult members leave their cult is not through deprogramming or a sudden awakening (although those do happen) but, rather, because the cult leader dies or is discredited.


Trump decisively losing the 2024 election may well be that discrediting and thus liberating event in the lives of many of his followers.

The challenge for the next year or so will be — for those of us who recognize the cult-like slavish devotion to Trump of his followers — to provide support to those followers we know to make the transition from the Trump cult back into the normal world. Therapy for the PTSD that made them vulnerable in the first place will also be helpful.

America can recover from this trauma, but it’ll take time and effort.


This all assumes, of course, that Trump loses this election. And making that happen is up to us: vote!

CRAZY 

Premier Danielle Smith announces plan to change Alberta Bill of Rights

TRYING TO MAKE ANTI VAXXERS A PROTECTED CATAGORY LIKE LGBTQ+

Lisa Johnson
Tue, September 24, 2024



EDMONTON — Premier Danielle Smith says she plans to reinforce the right to decide whether to receive a vaccination or other medical procedure in changes to the Alberta Bill of Rights.

In an online video posted Tuesday, Smith said her government aims to amend the document in a few weeks to ensure people have the right to make informed decisions without fear of undue pressure or interference by the government.

"It is my firm conviction that no Albertan should ever be subjected (to) or pressured into accepting a medical treatment without their full consent," she said.


The changes outlined by Smith would also ensure the province respects "the right of individuals to legally acquire, keep and safely use firearms."

Smith says she believes law-abiding gun owners have been targeted by the federal government, and she hopes the changes will better protect farmers, ranchers, hunters and sports enthusiasts.

The legislation would also declare that Albertans can't be deprived of their property without due process of law and fair compensation.

"This is a reaffirmation of your right to own and enjoy the property that you've worked so hard for," said Smith.

United Conservative Party members have been pushing Smith for the recognition of rights that go well beyond the Canadian Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including around guns, parental rights and taxes.

Smith's announcement comes as she faces a party leadership review in early November.

Alberta conservatives have been known to boot their own leaders from the top job, including former UCP premier Jason Kenney.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on Sept. 24, 2024.

Lisa Johnson, The Canadian Press

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

Austria’s far right woos anti-vaxxers with fund for vaccine ‘victims’


Herbert Kickl, former Austria's Interior Minister and member of FPOe (Austrian Freedom Party) speaks during the 33rd Ordinary Federal Party Congress in the Graz, Austria on September 14, 2019.

Monday, 23 Sep 2024 

VIENNA, Sept 23 — Anti-vaxxer Martin Rutter is delighted he has been able to apply for public funds for “vaccination victims” from his far-right allies who run the province around Vienna.

The controversial project, pushed through by the Freedom Party (FPOe) — which looks set to win this week’s Austrian elections—has raised the ire of other parties but has drawn thousands of applications.

“I have an association that takes care of vaccination victims,” said Rutter, who is known for spreading conspiracy theories online.

The 41-year-old helped organise massive demonstrations against the conservative-led government’s Covid measures, which were also attended by the FPOe’s leader Herbert Kickl.


The far right is tapping into still seething voter anger about restrictions during the Covid pandemic, which it hopes will propel them to power on Sunday.

“The FPOe was the only party that did not support these measures,” Rutter told AFP, describing them as an “orgy” of restrictions.

Cash for jab refuseniks

Rutter—who peddles conspiracy narratives online, including recommending fruits to cure cancer—has applied for money from a €31.3 million (RM146 million) fund set up by the Lower Austria region, which the FPOe co-governs, for “information events” he organises.

The fund was set up last year to “repair” the “poor crisis management” of the pandemic, according to Maximilian Fender-Tarczaly, who works for the FPOe state councillor in charge of the project.

The project is meant to support “victims... who are suffering from the various consequences of the disease, the measures and the vaccination”, he said in a written reply to AFP.

“The spectrum is broad... mental health problems, isolation, vaccination impairments, fines for non-compliance with health measures,” he wrote.

Some 5,700 applications had been approved and €3.7 million paid out by July, but “until now no money has been paid” to Rutter, Fender-Tarczaly said then.

The FPOe is keen to roll out the project nationally, railing in its election manifesto against the government’s “unprecedented indoctrination and brainwashing” during the pandemic.

‘Irresponsible’

Health Minister Johannes Rauch of the Greens party described the project as “irresponsible”, arguing that out of 20 million vaccinations, just 200 people have suffered side effects.

“Vaccination has saved millions of lives, and if the willingness to be vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella also decreases, this jeopardises the lives of children,” he said in May.

The opposition Social Democrats have accused the FPOe of “losing all moral sense” by offering a “bonus” to those who “attack elected officials”, while the opposition liberal NEOS party has slammed the far right for pandering to its base.

The pandemic—and in particular the government’s move to make vaccination mandatory, which was later scrapped—have led to lasting “polarisation” in the Alpine nation of nine million people, according to Julia Partheymueller, a political scientist from Vienna University.

The vaccinations “victims” project was a means to criticise “the government’s mistakes” and has come from a “desire for revenge” rather than reconciliation,” she argued. — AFP

Invisible Rulers: An Establishment Liberal Reads Chomsky, Fights Taibbi and Viral Disinformation

Review of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality by Renee DiResta

By Chris Green

September 8, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Until recently, Renee DiResta–author of the book under review–was the research manager at Stanford University’s Internet Observatory. She has served as a consultant to social media platforms about fighting disinformation relating to Covid vaccines and 2020 election fraud claims. During the Trump years she worked as an advisor to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the topic of Russian disinformation campaigns in the United States.

Her academic research interests have focused heavily on studying how viral disinformation–particularly from MAGA quarters–spreads. She became interested in the topic of viral disinformation while fighting anti-vaxxers as a leader in the successful fight in 2015 to remove the religious faith loophole from the legal requirement that all California school children be vaccinated.

She writes for such forums as The Atlantic and has spoken before the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to entering academia, she spent many years working on Wall Street. As a college undergraduate she interned at the CIA. The blurb page for her new book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality includes praise from such luminaries of the anti-Trump, neoliberal establishment as Professor Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum of the The Atlantic and Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, U.S. Army (Ret).

If this background is unlikely to inspire congenial feeling in a radical leftist, it is highly likely to make the blood of MAGA partisans boil. For some of the latter, DiResta–with her connections to the CIA, Wall Street, Big Tech and academica–has been the embodiment of a sinister anti-Trump establishment conspiring to suppress righteous MAGA populism.

DiResta’s Claim to Fame

Invisible Rulers is mostly a scholarly work exploring the phenomenon of viral disinformation but it also gives space to an account of DiResta being personally targeted by disinformation from MAGA-friendly quarters. When Elon Musk launched a propaganda campaign called the Twitter Files in late 2022–seeking to show that Twitter’s pre-Musk owners had collaborated with academics like DiResta and federal government agents in suppressing MAGA-friendly speech on Twitter–DiResta was presented as a primary villain in the alleged conspiracy. She argues convincingly that Matt Taibbi–one of the journalists Musk handpicked to publicly present Twitter Files documents–seriously misrepresented her work and actions in an effort to prove the conspiracy. Taibbi and his Twitter Files colleague Michael Shellenberger focused on DiResta as a lead villain in the Twitter Files when they testified about them before the US House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in March 2023.

After this testimony went viral in right-wing quarters on social media, a wave of harassment and threats followed against DiResta, her academic colleagues, and students. More importantly from DiResta’s perspective, the testimony spurred the subcommittee chairman, MAGA Republican Jim Jordan, to launch a congressional inquisition into academic anti-disinformation research institutions. It also spurred a major lawsuit against researchers at such institutions (including DiResta) by Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s America First Legal organization, scaring off potential funders and in other ways leading to academic anti-disinformation research currently largely grinding to a halt in the United States.

Question Raised

Viral disinformation can create serious public disturbances: for example, lies about electoral fraud led to the riots of January 6th. Academics like DiResta, election officials, librarians, physicians, scientists, and others have faced extensive campaigns of harassment, threats, doxing and other abuses as a result of online disinformation about issues ranging from the 2020 election to LGBTQ books in school libraries. Viral disinformation can also create serious public health problems as we saw during the Covid pandemic. In her book, DiResta references how viral disinformation launched by the anti-vaccine guru Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his followers played a nefarious role in a measles outbreak that killed 83 children in American Samoa in 2019.

Is there anything that can–or should–be done about viral disinformation spread by MAGA demagogues, anti-vax quacks, or any other source? Is it possible to encourage people to stop believing in stupid things and to encourage them to learn to think critically about information presented to them? How exactly does disinformation go viral? These are questions explored in DiResta’s book although I don’t think she answers them satisfactorily.

Problematic Analysis

DiResta’s book, in multiple places, offers respectful words towards the 1988 classic Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and the late Edward S. Herman. She writes that the book accurately described “colossal deceits” and “unjust wars…Chomsky’s critique of manufacturing consent was trenchant–and true.”

But DiResta holds that while the Chomsky/Herman analysis was true in the 1980s, its portrait of corporate media working to shape the views of the general population in the interests of the ruling class has lost much of its relevance in the social media era. She claims that in the current age, information distribution has been “democratized” through social media and other online platforms. Any ordinary person with charisma, storytelling ability, and, in many cases, a talent for grift–or in some cases people acting collectively in online groups–can manipulate online platform algorithms and go viral. Enormous sources of information–whether credible or not–are at everyone’s fingertips with a simple Google search.

Many people no longer trust traditional establishment sources of information, whether it be the New York Times or an infectious disease expert like Dr. Anthony Fauci. Instead, people are increasingly drawn to online influencers for analysis of the world around them. Many ordinary people find the speaking and writing of online influencers charismatic and relatable in ways they don’t with the “shifty pundits and elite academics” of the traditional establishment. For DiResta it is this dynamic that explains why countless numbers of well-intentioned people have believed that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; that Covid vaccines contain snake venom; and that sex-trafficked children are locked in the cabinets pictured in Wayfair furniture catalogs.

She believes that, as a nation, it would be wise for us to consider the expertise and knowledge of academics in the social and hard sciences as American society confronts a dizzying array of serious problems. She suggests that academics organize themselves and have the more charismatic among them jump into the online fray and present information in ways that can appeal to ordinary folk and counter the viral stupidity peddled by certain influencers. She allows that establishment academics and other traditional sources of expertise have been implicated in serious abuses of power and made serious mistakes. However, she asks, is it any better to have demagogic online influencers prey on the “doing my own research crowd” amongst the general population?–the sort of people who think they have incontrovertible evidence to destroy the established scientific consensus on Covid after watching a few YouTube videos and reading one or two articles the algorithms present to them on social media feeds.

It is not totally unreasonable for DiResta to argue for the ideal of foregrounding people who know what they’re talking about in the amplification and distribution of information–however, it is absurd for her to argue that US mass media has been in any way “democratized” since the publication of Manufacturing Consent. It seems to me that while the forms of distribution and amplification of information and opinion have changed significantly since the advent of the internet and social media, the fundamental dynamic described by Chomsky and Herman is still very much in play. In the social media era, the control of the distribution and amplification of information and opinion remains largely set by the interests of different factions of business elites and ruling class politicians. It seems to me that the tools of Marxist political economy might have allowed DiResta to present an infinitely more robust analysis of mass media in the social media age. However, she is an establishment liberal and radical analysis is clearly not much present in her field of vision (her praise of Manufacturing Consent notwithstanding).

Solutions

A problem she mentions constantly throughout the book is what she and others have called “bespoke realities:” Online algorithms process our data to understand our preferences and provide our social media feeds with content that reaffirms our existing prejudices, politically speaking and in other areas of life. Less than ever before are we exposed to alternative points of view in our information consumption. In the case of something like adherence to QAnon, this can have destructive consequences. She worries about Americans walling themselves off into groups of ideological niches, having no contact whatsoever with groups of other niches. She does not offer a clear solution to this problem: except, perhaps obliquely, when she writes that social media companies have already taken numerous reasonable steps to control the dissemination of extremist disinformation. She uses the words “economic inequality” to describe a source of the increasing extremism of American political rhetoric in recent years; she also suggests that online extremism is driven by legitimate grievances at real societal injustices. However, she does not elaborate on these references to structural sources of online political extremism.

In the last third of her book, she presents several solutions to the problems her book presents that are at least on the right track. She praises the decentralized, open-source social media platforms Bluesky and Mastodon: companies that while privately owned are run differently than typical corporate social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. She suggests people fighting extremist disinformation today can learn from the fight in the 1930s to de-platform Father Charles Coughlin, the Nazi-sympathizing talk radio demagogue. She also harkens back to the New Deal era when she praises the work of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA). Founded in the 1930s by journalists and academics, the IPA–before it was redbaited out of existence during the McCarthy era–sought to impart to the general population methods of seeing through propaganda directed at them by powerful forces. The IPA’s ideas about critical thinking skills are sound enough; however, DiResta provides no insight as to specific mechanisms through which the general population might be encouraged to practice those skills.

Final Words

It seems to me that DiResta’s book would have been better if it dropped its pretensions to academic scholarship and instead was a piece of straight reporting about and debunking prominent pieces of viral disinformation. When she adopted the latter course in parts of her book, the results were excellent: for example her dissection of a salient piece of disinformation launched by Dr. David McCullough, a prominent anti-Covid vaccine quack–or going back to the pre-internet era, a belief among evangelical Christians in the 1980s that a particular nuance in Procter & Gamble’s company logo indicated the company’s alignment with satanism. In contrast, in the first half of the book, she spends many words–sometimes ponderously–trying to present a framework for how information spreads and how people trust information sources. It is not always clear in the book’s first half where she is going with her arguments. On the plus side, she does have an engaging writing style (simple and lucid) that kept me reading the book even when I occasionally found the content a little thin.

I personally believe that solutions to the fight against viral disinformation–from MAGA or any other source–have to be predominantly bottom-up in nature as opposed to the top-down solutions offered by DiResta, with all her obsession about academic expertise. One solution might be a revitalized labor movement where unions offer labor education classes that can teach critical thinking skills about propaganda. Another solution could be the removal of all segments of mass media from corporate control. Mass media democratization–not in the bizarre sense that “democratization” is used by DiResta–implies ordinary people thoroughly controlling media institutions at the local level. In exploring steps about how society might reach mass media democratization, I encourage readers to explore such works as Victor Pickard’s 2020 book Democracy Without Journalism and Ben Tarnoff’s 2022 book Internet for the People.

In spite of her book’s limitations and its focus on top-down solutions to viral disinformation, it is clear that DiResta is an intelligent and deeply informed person–and, no doubt, a highly decent one as well. Significant parts of her book present thoughtful analysis. She is clearly nowhere near as villainous as she has been portrayed by Matt Taibbi and Jim Jordan.

In reference to her antagonist Taibbi, Diresta does vaguely at one point in her book give credit to Taibbi and his Twitter Files colleagues for raising a few legitimate concerns about government monitoring of social media content relating to Covid vaccines and alleged 2020 election fraud. Otherwise, she implies that he has become a mere grifter: he was once a progressive, populist investigative journalist but has now moved to the right politically, peddling MAGA-friendly populist nonsense to a large online audience that is receptive to it.

Whatever Taibbi’s exact motivations, it is relevant to note certain things. Both he and DiResta seemingly share the assumption that it is legitimate for all parts of American mass media to be under corporate control. While Taibbi grandstands before right-wing audiences as a free speech warrior defending MAGA’s constitutional liberties against deep state machinations–and Renee DiResta wrings her hands about declining trust in academic experts–the dynamic of bipartisan ruling class oppression carries on in much the same way as Chomsky and Herman described it in the 1980’s. Social movements representing traditionally oppressed communities continue to bear the brunt of state surveillance and repression. We have seen this recently with activists opposing Cop City in Atlanta–and also activists on college campuses opposing Israel’s Gaza genocide. Earlier this year independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported on how Biden’s intelligence community was surveilling anti-genocide student protestors; he also reported that the Biden administration was pressuring social media platforms to censor “pro-Hamas” i.e. anti-genocide social media posts.

The work of Renee DiResta contains value but it is going to take people much more radical than her–and much more serious than Matt Taibbi–to seriously address the issues raised by her writing.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov detained in judicial investigation involving 12 criminal counts, French prosecutors say

The Insider

26 August 2024

The investigation that led to the recent detention of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov this past Saturday was originally opened on July 8, 2024 against an “unnamed person.” It involved suspicion on 12 counts, including refusal to cooperate with law enforcement, complicity in drug distribution, child pornography, cybercrime, and fraud, according to a statement from the French public prosecutor's office released earlier today.

“Pavel Durov, founder and director of the Telegram instant messaging platform, was arrested and placed in police custody at 8 p.m. on Saturday, August 24, 2024 at Le Bourget [airport]. This measure was taken as part of a judicial investigation opened on July 8, 2024, following a preliminary investigation initiated by the J3 section (JUNALCO — National Jurisdiction for Combating Organized Crime) of the Paris public prosecutor's office,” the statement read.

The charges against the “unnamed person” in the case include:Complicity in administering an online platform to facilitate illegal transactions within an organized group.
Refusal to provide information or documents necessary for lawful interceptions at the request of competent authorities.
Complicity in the possession of pornographic images of minors.
Complicity in distributing, offering, or providing pornographic images of minors within an organized group.
Complicity in the purchase, transportation, possession, offer, or sale of narcotic substances.
Complicity in offering, selling, or providing, without lawful justification, equipment, tools, programs, or data designed to gain unauthorized access to and impair the operation of automated data processing systems.
Complicity in organized group fraud.
Criminal conspiracy to commit a crime or offense punishable by five or more years of imprisonment.
Laundering proceeds from crimes or offenses committed by an organized group.
Providing cryptographic services for privacy without a certified statement.
Providing a cryptographic tool that does not exclusively offer authentication or integrity control without a prior declaration.
Importing a cryptographic tool that provides authentication or integrity control without a prior declaration.

Durov notably holds multiple passports. He is a citizen of France, the United Arab Emirates, and the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis. The independent Russian publication Agentstvo.Novosti, citing data from Russian government services portal Gosuslugi, reported on Sunday that Durov still holds a valid Russian passport.

In mid-April 2022 — several months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — Durov asked Forbes not to call him a Russian billionaire, joining the likes of Revolut co-founder Nikolay Storonsky, tech investor Yuri Milner, and Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh. “Pavel left Russia many years ago with no intention to return,” his spokesperson told the publication.

Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov earlier today told reporters that the Kremlin “does not know what exactly Durov is accused of,” which meant “it would be wrong to make any statements,” as per a report by the Russian news agency Interfax.

“We haven't heard any official statements to that effect yet. And before saying anything, we need to wait for the situation to be clarified: what exactly they are trying to charge Durov [with],” Peskov said.

He added that Vladimir Putin did not meet with Durov during his recent visit to Azerbaijan. Earlier, the Telegram channel Baza, which is reportedly affiliated with the Russian authorities, quoted a source as saying that the Russian president refused to meet with the Telegram founder while in Baku.

In a statement published on X on August 26, French President Emmanuel Macron took the position that Durov's detention was not politically motivated:
“The arrest of the president of Telegram on French soil took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation. It is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on the matter.”

Macron’s tweet also stressed that “France is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship. It will remain so.”

However, Macron did not specify the exact nature of French law enforcement's concerns regarding the Telegram founder. Durov was detained at the Le Bourget airport outside Paris shortly after landing on a private jet late on Saturday. The arrest reportedly came in connection to the lack of moderation on Telegram and the platform's refusal to cooperate with French security services.

Pavel Durov, alongside his brother Nikolai, launched Telegram in August 2013, with Nikolai responsible for developing the technology behind the cloud-based messaging platform. Telegram, headquartered in Dubai, now boasts over 950 million active users worldwide, according to the company. Forbes estimates Pavel Durov's net worth at $15 billion.

The platform remains among the few avenues available to Russian citizens looking to bypass government censorship amid an increasingly stringent crackdown on the country’s information space.

Telegram is also extensively used by the Russian military for its internal communications, and the arrest of its founder led to a flurry of angered reactions among pro-war bloggers, including Alexander Sladkov.

“Pavel Durov was arrested. This attack on the owner of [Telegram], on which half of the communications in the [war] are held, was expected. Now we urgently need to create a Russian military messenger,” Sladkov wrote.

The Russian Telegram channel Rybar, founded by Mikhail Zvinchuk, a former employee of Russia's Defense Ministry, similarly noted that Telegram “has now become almost the main means of controlling units in the [special military operation] zone.”
“It will be very sad and funny at the same time if it is Pavel Durov's arrest that will be the catalyst for changes in the approaches to communication and control means in the Russian Armed Forces. And not the purely military problems that have piled up over the past two years, which for some reason [the Russian Defense Ministry] preferred to turn a blind eye to.”

Cover image: A screenshot from Durov’s April 2024 interview with former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. Source: YouTube / Tucker Carlson

French police have arrested the founder of Telegram. What happens next could change the course of big tech

PTI |
Aug 27, 2024 


Sydney, When Pavel Durov arrived in France on his private jet last Saturday, he was greeted by police who promptly arrested him. As the founder of the direct messaging platform Telegram, he was accused of facilitating the widespread crimes committed on it.

The following day, a French judge extended Durov’s initial period of detention, allowing police to detain him for up to 96 hours.

Telegram has rejected the allegations against Durov. In a statement, the company said:

It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.

The case may have far-reaching international implications, not just for Telegram but for other global technology giants as well.

Who is Pavel Durov?

Born in Russia in 1984, Pavel Durov also has French citizenship. This might explain why he felt free to travel despite his app’s role in the Russia-Ukraine War and its widespread use by extremist groups and criminals more generally.

Durov started an earlier social media site, VKontakte, in 2006, which remains very popular in Russia. However, a dispute with how the new owners of the site were operating it led to him leaving the company in 2014.

It was shortly before this that Durov created Telegram. This platform provides both the means for communication and exchange as well as the protection of encryption that makes crimes harder to track and tackle than ever before. But that same protection also enables people to resist authoritarian governments that seek to prevent dissent or protest.

Durov also has connections with famed tech figures Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and enjoys broad support in the vocally libertarian tech community. But his platform is no stranger to legal challenges – even in his birth country.


An odd target

Pavel Durov is in some ways an odd target for French authorities.

Meta’s WhatsApp messenger app is also encrypted and boasts three times as many users, while X’s provocations for hate speech and other problematic content are unrepentantly public and increasingly widespread.

There is also no suggestion that Durov himself was engaged with making any illegal content. Instead, he is accused of indirectly facilitating illegal content by maintaining the app in the first place.

However, Durov’s unique background might go some way to suggest why he was taken in.

Unlike other major tech players, he lacks US citizenship. He hails from a country with a chequered past of internet activity – and a diminished diplomatic standing globally thanks to its war against Ukraine.


His app is large enough to be a global presence. But simultaneously it is not large enough to have the limitless legal resources of major players such as Meta.

Combined, these factors make him a more accessible target to test the enforcement of expanding regulatory frameworks.

A question of moderation

Durov’s arrest marks another act in the often confusing and contradictory negotiation of how much responsibility platforms shoulder for the content on their sites.

These platforms, which include direct messaging platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp but also broader services such as those offered by Meta’s Facebook and Musk’s X, operate across the globe.

As such, they contend with a wide variety of legal environments.

This means any restriction put on a platform ultimately affects its services everywhere in the world – complicating and frequently preventing regulation.


On one side, there is a push to either hold the platforms responsible for illegal content or to provide details on the users that post it.

In Russia, Telegram itself was under pressure to provide names of protesters organising through its app to protest the war against Ukraine.

Conversely, freedom of speech advocates have fought against users being banned from platforms. Meanwhile political commentators cry foul of being “censored” for their political views.

These contradictions make regulation difficult to craft, while the platforms’ global nature make enforcement a daunting challenge. This challenge tends to play in platforms’ favour, as they can exercise a relatively strong sense of platform sovereignty in how they decide to operate and develop.

But these complications can obscure the ways platforms can operate directly as deliberate influencers of public opinion and even publishers of their own content.


To take one example, both Google and Facebook took advantage of their central place in the information economy to advertise politically orientated content to resist the development and implementation of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code.

The platforms’ construction also directly influences what content can appear and what content is recommended – and hate speech can mark an opportunity for clicks and screen time.

Now, pressure is increasing to hold platforms responsible for how they moderate their users and content. In Europe, recent regulation such as the Media Freedom Act aims to prevent platforms from arbitrarily deleting or banning news producers and their content, while the Digital Services Act requires that these platforms provide mechanisms for removing illegal material.

Australia has its own Online Safety Act to prevent harms through platforms, though the recent case involving X reveals that its capacity may be quite limited. Future implications


Durov is currently only being detained, and it remains to be seen what, if anything, will happen to him in coming days.

But if he is charged and successfully prosecuted, it could lay the groundwork for France to take wider actions against not only tech platforms, but also their owners. It could also embolden nations around the world – in the West and beyond – to undertake their own investigations.

In turn, it may also make tech platforms think far more seriously about the criminal content they host. AMS

The crazy life and times of Pavel Durov, Russia’s Elon Musk

Is the arrested Telegram CEO a free speech martyr or a shadowy criminal?


Pavel Durov likes to frame himself as the patron of the individual citizen against government snooping. | Michelle Rohn for POLITICO

August 26, 2024

By Eva Hartog

Pavel Durov loves a good show.

The first glimpse many Russians caught of the current Telegram CEO — now languishing in Paris police custody — was in May 2012 when a small fleet of paper airplanes made out of cash descended on St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt, the city's main thoroughfare.

His face half hidden by a black cap, cameras captured a young Durov hanging out by an upstairs window, clearly enjoying himself as an agitated crowd scrabbled for more 5,000 ruble notes which the young tech prodigy was raining down from above.

At the time, Durov was the head of VKontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, which had skyrocketed to success aided by the near-total absence of online regulation.

A self-professed libertarian, Durov likes to frame himself as the patron of the individual citizen against government snooping. Authorities in France, however, are now probing him for his defense of a far less noble group of people, including pedophiles, drug dealers and gangsters.

Free speech martyr or shadowy criminal? Durov's reality is much more complex.
Durov's revenge

Authority and Durov have never been best friends.

As a student, Durov hacked his school’s computer network so it would show a photo of his least favorite teacher with the text "must die" as a screen saver.

Now in his late thirties, he still combines the nerdy reclusiveness of Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg — taking after his brother Nikolai, who was a child math prodigy and is rumored to be the real brain behind the Durovs’ success — with the contrarian eccentricity and narcissism of Elon Musk.

Not long after the money-throwing episode, VKontakte began experiencing serious trouble. In the wake of large anti-Kremlin protests, Russia’s security service, the FSB, demanded greater control over the social media platform.

Under pressure, Durov sold his shares in the company and fled Russia in 2014, announcing his departure with a picture of dolphins and a line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

Pavel Durov was the head of VKontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook. | Nadine Rupp/Getty Images

For the Kremlin it was a case of good riddance. VKontakte was rebranded VK and co-opted, with the children of Russian President Vladimir Putin's acolytes appointed to key positions.

But like the heroes in his favorite films, Durov soon got his revenge. From Dubai, he doubled down on Telegram, an encrypted messaging service whose significance and success far outgrew that of his first company.
Who uses Telegram?

Today, Telegram is among the most popular messenger apps in Russia and in other post-Soviet countries, as well as in India and in a handful of autocracies such as Iran.

For people living in countries where they risk jail for an injudicious word or opinion, the app promises a safe means of communication.

What sets it apart from rival messengers, however, is that Telegram is also a media platform in its own right. Think: WhatsApp, Facebook and X, all in one.

That hybrid quality has made it a core platform for more uses than just texting, and more users than just government critics.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Telegram became a primary mode of communication on both sides of the front lines. A new group of military bloggers, some with more than a million followers, have also made it their preferred platform.

Seeming to hold no grudge against Durov, top Russian Kremlin figures and propagandists also have channels on Telegram.

But Telegram, along with YouTube, has provided a refuge on the other side of the political divide for media outlets that were blocked by Russian authorities under wartime censorship laws.

“It’s become a replacement for independent media which have been squeezed out of the public space,” Lev Gershenzon, the Russian founder of news aggregator The True Story, told POLITICO. Gershenzon previously served as head of news at Russia's Yandex search engine, but resigned in protest of censorship at the company.

Telegram pushed back strongly against any suggestion of wrongdoing in an online statement. | Leon Neal/Getty Images

But in Europe, where citizens face fewer dangers from their democratically elected governments, Telegram’s function is “an altogether different story,” Gershenzon said.

Here it is used mostly by groups on the margins of society, such as anti-vaxxers, or by those with a vested interest in secure communications. More ominously, it has also become a mirror dark web for terrorists and those dealing in drugs, weapons and child pornography.

“In Russia, Telegram is a safe haven [from] the government’s fight against civil society,” Russian opposition politician Maxim Katz said in a livestream Monday. “In Europe, Telegram is a safe haven for criminals.”

Telegram pushed back strongly against any suggestion of wrongdoing in an online statement Sunday, saying it abides by all EU laws and that its founder “has nothing to hide.”

Meanwhile, Durov himself has remained elusive. He’s notoriously hard to reach for media, and reportedly also for governments; nor is much known about his personal life or the way his company is run. He is a citizen of the United Arab Emirates and, for reasons that remain murky, France.

When he has emerged from the shadows, it has usually been to cause a splash — to show off his six pack, to example, or to announce in a fit of TMI that he has fathered 100 children.

Is Telegram really safe?

In the months leading up to his arrest, Durov had been more visible. In a rare interview, with conservative media personality Tucker Carlson, he claimed he’d been pressured by the intelligence services of various countries to give them backdoor access to Telegram — singling the U.S. out for special mention — but that had always refused.

Many independent Russian internet experts, however, point to a number of cases when channels linked to the opposition were restricted for no clear reason. While Telegram also complied with European sanctions against propaganda network RT, Gershenzon said it seemed to suggest Durov was more open to negotiating with governments than he would have his followers believe.

In 2020, for example, Telegram’s Vice President Ilya Perekopsky met with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Mishustin аt a tech panel in the Russian city of Kazan.

Before being arrested in Paris this weekend, Durov was in Azerbaijan where, according to speculation, he tried to secure a meeting with Putin, who happened to be visiting at the same time. (The Kremlin’s spokesperson said Monday that the two did not meet.)

Regardless of the nature of his ties to Russia, Durov’s arrest is a coup for the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.

In the months leading up to his arrest, Pavel Durov had been more visible.

 | Olga Maltseva/Getty Images

Initial reactions from Moscow suggest it will frame Durov’s arrest as an example of Western hypocrisy on free speech. At the same time, propagandists are also likely to argue Moscow was right to clamp down on Durov, first with VKontakte and more recently in 2018 when it tried unsuccessfully to block Telegram.

They're unlikely to mention, however, that in Russia, such moves have been motivated primarily by a desire to silence the voices of political critics, rather than those of criminals. That trend has recently spread to curbing YouTube, nudging Russia in the direction of a Chinese-style firewall.

Durov’s legal team will likely argue that he can't be held responsible for the actions of a few rotten apples, unsavory though they may be, or prioritize targeting them over the interests of some billion other users.

"Our right to privacy is more important than the fear of terrorism," Durov said in 2016, defending Apple’s right to resist FBI access to the encrypted iPhone of a man involved in a mass shooting.

Regardless of the facts, the detained Durov has two elements playing in his favor. The first is that his case is taking place in France, where it is still possible to get a fair trial, unlike in Russia (where the acquittal rate is 0.03 percent). The second is that his case will play out partly in the informational sphere and in the court of public opinion.

Judging by his past, that's an arena for which Durov, the showman, has been preparing his entire adult life.