If you are in Republican circles, the name of Ken Cuccinelli continues to come up as the reason why conservative fortunes in Virginia have seen a terrible nosedive.
Just four years after Republicans scored three sweeping statewide wins on the coattails of then-Governor Bob McDonnell with a 59% win, Cuccinelli kicked off a series of three crushing losses (Cuccinelli ’13, Gillespie ’17, and now Stewart ’18) as nationalist politics and organs such as Breitbart News and the alt-right began infiltrating Virginia politics.
It’s no secret that Russian money is actively targeting projects like the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, secretly funding radical and Antifa-based environmentalist groups while actively seeking to meddle in the U.S. energy industry — and gathering additional support from unlikely quarters.
Case in point? The Russian government is thumping its chest this week as three cargo containers full of light natural gas have made their way to American ports.
“Oddly enough, with all this visible public flow of negative rhetoric [towards Moscow] from Washington, Russian liquefied natural gas is successfully being supplied to the US. Recently, at least three tankers with liquefied natural gas from the [Russian] Yamal LNG field on board have reached the US coast,” Sputnik quoted [Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson] Zakharova as saying at a news briefing on Thursday.
Good news for the Russians, right? All the more reason to keep America from developing its own natural gas resources… and target number one? The Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
There’s a reason why insiders are looking at the ACP as a national security issue. With the Port of Virginia slated to become one of a dozen international ports of call and the home of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and four carrier groups? It is no small wonder why the Russian government would not unleash every inch of its disinformation machine against the project.
Enter Ken Cuccinelli, who during the final weeks of a critical 2018 election sought not to prop up fellow conservatives… but blast American energy projects.
It is also no secret at all that Russian money and influence are also highly active online — not with Republican interests in mind — but simply seeking to take down the American government and our constitutional way of life, purchasing influence while masking it as actual concern from otherwise neutral parties.
The principle tools of disinformation? Fear and division… because on a psychological level, even if the reason behind it are invalid, one’s reaction to it is very real on a physiological level. When exposed to a threat (global warming, the Russians, the economy, terrorism) the brain’s prefrontal cortex engages the amygdala, releasing chemical and producing a physiological effect. The information doesn’t even have to be real because the emotions are real.
That’s how fake news works, folks.
Here’s how those weapons work when put to text. From Cuccinelli’s op-ed in the Washington Post:
The only thing standing between us and a $2.5 billion rate increase is the State Corporation Commission, which could protect Virginians by forcing Dominion to absorb its own costs of investment, which any other non-monopoly business would have to do as a matter of course.
From my view as a former Virginia attorney general, the process that allows Dominion to do business this way is broken, and Virginia consumers will be left holding the bag.
The pipeline may have other uses that will benefit the commonwealth, but Dominion’s shareholders should bear that risk, not Virginians who have no say and no profit in the venture.
How will this go forward? Look for the following: pro-Dominion cronyist legislation in the Virginia General Assembly that effectively orders the State Corporation Commission to charge Dominion’s customers the full cost of the pipeline. After all, Dominion consistently gets the General Assembly to do its bidding on a bipartisan basis, so why should we expect that to change now?
…but millions of people are going to die. Get it?
Cuccinelli’s attempt at employing these tactics is clumsy, but for our purposes it should work to demonstrate just how patent the argument is:
(1) There’s a dangerous $2.5 billion rate increase! (fear, anxiety)
(2) Big Brain/Little Brain Fallacy (“…as a former attorney general”)
(3) Followed by a Machiavellian “for my enemies, nothing” character flaw.
You see how this works? There’s a boogeyman; trust me… let’s git ’em!
Switch out your boogeyman — it could be global warming, terrorists, caravans, school shootings, safe spaces, you name it. The tactic works because we are human beings…
…and once you spot it and understand how it works? One can pick up on when a story or meme hits you in the amygdala — and wonder whether that’s a genuine response, or whether you a victim of memetic warfare.
Of course, this practice of disinformation (what the CIA calls “active measures”) is a tried and true tactic developed by the Soviets back in the 1950s, recently weaponized in the United States as the Russian government has chosen to do what we do all over the world in reaction to the Maidan “democratic uprising” in 2013/14.
…but when you see it in Virginia, and among Virginia politicians, directed at energy projects with a national security twist that the Russian Federation would have a vested interest in bringing to a screeching halt?
It makes folks wonder what the financial considerations might be.
