By 2010, the global recession had caused unemployment rates to soar. As economies tanked and opportunities vanished, protests broke out in North America, the Middle East, Europe, and parts of Asia. While every protest was unique, all reflected the despair citizens felt as rulers responded to economic misery with ruthless indifference. Tunisia’s revolution, for example, began in 2010 when a man, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest government apathy to mass unemployment. The new era of uprisings coincided with the rise of smartphones and social media, meaning that demonstrators not only became more visible, but that their methods of mobilization changed—as did state surveillance and retaliation.
At the time, I could not look away from the protests even if I wanted. Authoritarianism and digital media were the focus of my graduate school research, which had begun with a study of how Uzbeks reacted online to the slaughter of fellow citizens by their government. In May 2005, Uzbekistan’s military forces fired on roughly ten thousand people who had gathered in the city of Andijon to protest the unjust imprisonment of Muslim businessmen as well as general regional hardship. On the orders of dictator Islam Karimov, more than seven hundred people were shot to death, and many Uzbek activists and journalists were forced into exile. Western media and international observers were thrown out of the country by Uzbek officials, who were desperate to deny that the massacre had occurred.
But the attempt to silence dissidents through exile backfired. Exiled Uzbeks now had freedom of speech and internet access for the first time. Scattered around the world, they launched blogs and published decades of reporting that had been banned in Uzbekistan, ranging from Soviet-era samizdat, underground literature, to banned reports from Andijon. The Uzbek government had claimed the jailed businessmen in Andijon were part of a terrorist group called Akromiya, which in their view had justified their own brutal retaliation. But while doing archival research, I found state documents indicating that Uzbek state propagandists had created Akromiya as a pretext to suppress civilian dissent. The more I read both the official and the eyewitness accounts of Andijon, the more suspicious I became. I published a paper, “Inventing Akromiya,”1 which was later used by the United Nations to evaluate claims from Uzbek asylum seekers. The paper got me banned from Uzbekistan, curtailing my ability to do research in Central Asia, but I did not care. In 2006, I had to choose between my career and telling the truth. I chose the truth and never regretted it.
The Andijon massacre was one of many protests in the former USSR in the 2000s. These uprisings—which also occurred in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine—were known as “the color revolutions,” a reference to the colors of flowers often used as symbols of nonviolent disobedience. The uprisings yielded mixed results, ranging from democratic reforms followed by backsliding in Ukraine, to the replacement of one autocratic ruler with another in Kyrgyzstan, to the brutal massacre in Uzbekistan. Putin saw the revolutions as a threat: “We see what tragic consequences the wave of so-called color revolutions led to,” he proclaimed. “For us this is a lesson and a warning. We should do everything necessary so that nothing similar ever happens in Russia.”2 These changes in governance occurred as the Russian mafia was expanding into Europe and North America, with oligarchs preying on loosened financial laws and then on financial instability. The “we” in Putin’s sentence remains undefined, but at that time his network certainly stretched well beyond the borders of his country. A continual global heist requires a stable network of partners.
The Western view of protest has been marred by the fact that we hear most about those that succeed: the toppled dictators, the noble sacrifices, the inmates turned presidents. In reality, many protests fail and the protesters end up unappreciated and even demonized. There are no clear statistics on failed protests for the very reason that failed protests, especially in repressive countries, rarely reach an audience beyond those who participated. But failures have their own impact. In the aftermath of the Andijon massacre, a joke circulated on Uzbek web forums:
Q: Can an Uzbek participate in a demonstration in Uzbekistan?
A: Yes, but only once.
The joke was a dark reminder of what citizens of authoritarian states know all too well, that protest carries great risk and governments kill with impunity. They do not care who knows the extent of their brutality or the audacity of their lies; flaunting power is the point. But state power depends on the dehumanization of the victims to succeed. In the Uzbek case, the victims needed to be erased. For Uzbeks to even joke about Andijon was dangerous, for that meant acknowledging that the massacre was real. To joke, even bitterly, was to reclaim their power as witnesses to an act of state violence. This is a notable lesson about documentation in our current dictator-ridden digital era, when it is easier to be disappeared than ever before.
In the late 2000s, academia resisted examining the increasing importance of the internet to politics. Academia had always been behind the curve when it came to technology—by the 2010s, the first studies of the long-abandoned MySpace were trickling into journals—but the topic was borderline taboo in anthropology. To examine an online community meant to challenge the idea of a field site, which is the foundation of ethnographic methodology. But I saw no clear delineation between virtual and material life—not only among the scattered Uzbek dissidents whom I interviewed via the web for years, but among Americans. For all of my adult life, the digital world was the real world. As smartphones and social media took off, the idea that the two were disparate realms became harder to justify.
Despite its pervasiveness, I did not see the internet as an inherently democratizing force. Instead, I worried it exacerbated the worst tendencies of its users, even while giving them new avenues for self-expression. For citizens of authoritarian states dominated by conspiracy theories and lies, the internet proved a terrible tool for building trust. The same features of online discourse that people in free states found liberating—the ability to join and leave a community at will, to write under multiple identities, to preserve and resurrect old arguments—made the internet perilous for participants whose default mode was distrust due to the long-standing oppression they had experienced. You could reinvent yourself on the internet, but you could not start over.
In the early 2010s, most scholars of digital technology and politics emphasized the positive. They envisioned a borderless world in which citizens, buoyed by technology, could expose and thereby rectify structural problems. Their enthusiasm extended to social media corporations, which were often credited for a successful demonstration instead of the actual protesters. In the West, Iran’s 2009 uprising was deemed a “Twitter Revolution” and the Arab Spring was called a “Facebook Revolution.” Western conceptions of success led to the hardship of protesters on the ground being played down. The potential threat of their corporate supporters was also poorly discerned. Social media corporations that would grow into powerful surveillance monopolies presented themselves in the early 2010s as fellow underdogs in the broader struggle against the system. Vulnerable activists gave them their information.
Meanwhile, the assets of companies like Facebook and Google were growing exponentially each year. During the first half of the decade, I was invited to a number of lavish events held by what digital media scholar Evgeny Morozov derisively called “cyber-utopians.” In 2012, I attended a party Google held in a caravansary in Azerbaijan—another former Soviet republic run by a resource-hoarding dictator—held in part for visitors to the United Nations Internet Governance Forum. Google had arranged for a pro-government blogger to debate an anti-government blogger. They had flexed their corporate muscle to allow the anti-government blogger to get his opinion heard on the ground; a rare event in authoritarian Azerbaijan. The event was well intentioned—and again, it seems remarkable in retrospect that any Silicon Valley company even sought to cultivate democracy in the former USSR—but it misunderstood how authoritarian states most effectively use the internet, which is through a process called networked authoritarianism.
Networked authoritarianism, a term coined by social scientist Rebecca MacKinnon, describes an internet that is just open enough so that it can be exploited by bad actors, who use it to bombard users with propaganda, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks.3 It is the loudest way of silencing the public voice, and is more effective than traditional state censorship, which is what more insular authoritarian regimes like Uzbekistan practice. In Azerbaijan, dissidents were allowed just enough room to speak their mind online, and then were punished by the state for doing so and held up as examples in order to intimidate the public. Two Azerbaijani friends of mine were jailed for two years after releasing a satirical online video where one mocked state lies about agricultural trade by wearing a donkey suit.4 Another journalist friend was the target of attempted blackmail when a state surveillance agency made a sex tape of her and circulated it, with the goal of humiliating and stoking threats against her.5 Both were paraded as cautionary tales for aspiring dissidents, and the government used the very internet that was supposed to be the source of liberation to tell them.
In the early 2010s, Russia also practiced network authoritarianism. “Many have noted the curious absence of censorship on the Russian-speaking internet which largely remains a free-for-all zone, quite unlike traditional media which are kept on a tight leash,” wrote journalist Alexey Kovalev in an optimistic 2010 editorial called “Russia’s Blogging Revolution.”6 The rationale for the open internet became clear when Russian officials used it to publicize the arrests of popular dissidents like the blogger Alexey Navalny and the punk band Pussy Riot over the next few years. Instead of fearing the open internet, Kremlin officials embraced it, using social media to smear the opposition and to release a firehose of propaganda intended to overwhelm citizens’ faculty for critical thinking.7 The emergence of networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Russia’s VKontakte in the 2000s and 2010s made disinformation easier to spread. The arrival of memes allowed eye-catching lies to be delivered via mobile phone, meaning users who lacked home computers could circumvent the internet entirely. Before I left academia for good, networked authoritarianism was my focus—not only because of its danger to citizens of authoritarian states, but because I could see the utility of the model in Western states that were experiencing a similar erosion of institutional trust.
In a 2011 article for The Atlantic, I described the Uzbek political internet, focusing on a fake Facebook account that had deceived the Uzbek dissident community—a preview of the type of fake online persona that would be weaponized in the West in 2016. I wrote:
People involved in Uzbek politics are accustomed to rumor and lies. It’s common practice to assume that all information is unreliable and all sources biased, which ensures that all rumors are taken seriously. Rumor is not automatically believed, of course, so much as it is shared, parsed, and discussed—sometimes far beyond what its dubious origins might merit. The result of ubiquitous paranoia is not disbelief. It is credulity.
When all information is assumed fraudulent and all sources suspect, when your worst suspicions about your government are routinely confirmed and denied, when online communication—itself nebulous and malleable—is your only means of interaction, what do you do? You follow your principles.… But in Uzbekistan, following your principles often gets you nowhere. And there’s not much you can do about it.8
When I wrote this passage in 2011, I did not know that eight years later, I could substitute “America” for “Uzbekistan” and it would serve as an apt summary of Trump-era politics. I was writing during the last gasps of the internet as a potential force for democracy, before Silicon Valley companies surrendered to the filthy lucre obtained by spying on citizens and data mining personal profiles for the benefit of hostile states. It was a time when people would learn that Google’s slogan was “Don’t Be Evil” and not burst into ironic laughter. American exceptionalism was always an illusion, and Americans had long been prone to paranoid conspiracies, but even I was surprised by the quickness with which US political culture came to mirror that of surveillance states. I had not anticipated how quickly the cyber-utopianism embraced by internet corporations would turn into nihilist abdication of the public good.
Among the few who saw the threat clearly was computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who, in 2010, warned the public of a new danger: WikiLeaks. At the time, free speech advocates were hailing WikiLeaks, and its founder, Julian Assange, as defenders of government transparency. Their lionization of the leaker organization was largely due to frustration with the criminal impunity of the Bush administration. In February 2010, soldier Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes by sending classified documents to WikiLeaks, which WikiLeaks then published online. The emphasis on civilian victims led human rights advocates to believe that WikiLeaks would prove a formidable opponent for autocratic regimes. But after WikiLeaks dropped hacked documents from the US State Department in November, Lanier predicted the opposite—that WikiLeaks would ultimately ally with dictators and that social media networks would abet them:
The WikiLeaks method punishes a nation—or any human undertaking—that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn’t have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does.
If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness. WikiLeaks is one prototype of a digital power center, but others include hedge funds and social networking sites.
This is the world we are headed to, it seems, since people are unable to resist becoming organized according to the digital architectures that connect us. The only way out is to change the architecture.9
Social media sites didn’t change the architecture. Instead, over the course of the 2010s, the architecture changed us. The calculus of post–Cold War politics—that democracy spreads through engagement, that technology enhances freedom—was reversed. Hostile states used digital technology not only to attack their own citizens but to attempt to transform foreign democracies into dictatorships. We saw this with Russian influence operations in elections in the United States, France, and in the Brexit referendum, among others.10 The social media corporations that had once bragged of the internet’s liberating power now helped the hijackers of democracy. Networks like Facebook abetted, whether intentionally or not, the “iron triangles” of organized crime, state corruption, and corporate criminality, and they were aided by complicit Western actors content to let their own countries die while turning a profit.
In late January 2011, I gave birth to my son. There were complications. I had to have a C-section, and my son was born with fluid in his lungs, requiring him to stay in the newborn intensive care unit. During this time, St. Louis was bracing for an ice storm so severe that most of the hospital staff was ordered to evacuate, and once my insurance ran out, I was ordered to leave too—even though that meant I would be separated from my baby and unable to see him or nurse him for days. I refused, saying I’d sleep on the waiting room floor if the insurance company kicked me out of my bed. The staff felt sorry for us and decided to let my son—who seemed to have no major problems and who turned out to be fine—leave a day early. My husband and newborn and I raced the storm home, arriving right before the roads became impassable.
There are a few things I remember about our arrival: the gratitude that we were finally home safe as a family, the way my three-year-old daughter looked back and forth between me and her new brother and said, “Oh, it got out,” before returning to playing with her blocks, and the television, which was showing some kind of revolution. I had not checked the news in two weeks.
“What’d I miss?” I asked, as the screen filled with chanting protesters.
“Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you,” my husband said. “Egypt had a revolution while you were in the hospital and Mubarak is on his way out.”
I remember thinking that I was witnessing something beautiful. I felt inspired that my son had been born into a world that was changing for the better at last—a world where decades-long dictatorships were crumbling in the face of a new generation of resilient protesters. If it could happen in Egypt, maybe it would happen in Uzbekistan, and maybe my exiled friends could finally go home and live in peace. Maybe we were witnessing the start of a worldwide movement for freedom akin to the revolutions that had toppled communist dictators in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In retrospect, I was extremely high on postsurgery Percocet as I thought this, but it wasn’t just the drugs or the sentimentality of new motherhood talking. In 2011, the world seemed to hang in the balance between good and evil, with rapid technological change bringing new visibility to the weaknesses of autocratic regimes. We did not know that evil had already launched its own plans, transnational criminal ambitions that were far beyond the scope of a sole state fighting its citizens. Mueller’s “iron triangles” speech was also in January 2011. Obama declared organized crime a national emergency a few months later. Our day-to-day lives carried on, though, and no one paid much attention to either development.
The rest of the year brought live-streamed revolution. The protests erupting throughout the Middle East and later in Russia were encouraged by sympathizers watching online from abroad. Americans began to rise up against corporate corruption: Occupy Wall Street emerged in the summer of 2011, accompanied by similar protests against austerity and income inequality worldwide. By the end of 2012, a mass movement for a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage had taken off in the United States, and in May 2013, St. Louis became the third US city to hold a large grassroots protest in favor of a living wage and a workers’ union. I had been to protests in St. Louis many times before, but this one was racially integrated and not stamped out by the police, a relative rarity. I had long felt that I was born in a bad era, forever in the wrong place at the wrong time—but now I felt we had a chance for change.
In the early 2010s, activists around the world often organized together with the expectation of good faith. There was a sense in the early 2010s that awareness in and of itself mattered, that the new mediums making people more aware of citizens’ suffering would therefore make them more empathetic and more likely to stand up for the afflicted. This was most evident in Syria, where activists in 2011 and 2012 sent out daily documentation of Assad’s brutality, with the hope that if his war crimes were witnessed, rather than masked by state propaganda, they would be stopped. Instead, Syria became the most well-documented war in history, a shame and a failure of the international community.11 Protesters were screaming into a moral void.
The complicity and greed of the global elite seemed the biggest barrier to change. What it both masked and enabled was worse: the rebirth of global fascism. The fringes had not yet become the center—or moved into the White House—but the movement was there. The weaponization of social media by authoritarian states and corporate intelligence agencies like Cambridge Analytica had begun; they were mapping the terrain as we obliviously inhabited it.12 Protesters were not yet cauterized by the vicious cynicism that dominates political culture today. A nightmarish act of violence was still viewed by most as a nightmarish act of violence; not a meme, not a joke. Now we live in an era when mass shooters livestream their massacres while online forums cheer the body count like it’s a video game.13 This is the architecture of the internet that Lanier warned about, an algorithmic facilitation of cruelty and pain.
Something had broken in how we treated each other. It wasn’t about civility or respectability, but about empathy, kindness, and respect. By the end of 2014, I was exhausted from a year of documenting nonstop and often inexplicable atrocities: the Syrian war, the rise of ISIS, Ebola, Russia invading and annexing Crimea, the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the shooting down of a passenger airliner in Ukraine by Russia, the kidnapping of girls by Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Mass harassment and threats had exploded online, fueled by misogynist movements like Gamergate and the rise of neo-Nazis—often halting productive discussions and driving participants off social media.14 Despite pleas from the victims, social media companies did almost nothing to stop it.15
The troll epidemic and spread of toxic online culture is not merely a source of anguish for many users, but an ignored national security threat. Throughout 2014, female and nonwhite online activists—and in particular, black women on Twitter—noticed a shift in social media discourse that left them suspicious. In summer 2014, writers Shafiqah Hudson and l’Nasah Crockett launched the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing to expose accounts impersonating black users and making obnoxious political claims.16 Many of these accounts were later revealed to be Russian troll accounts seeking to map the US political landscape and prepare to influence the 2016 election.17 Other trolls were right-wing users in the United States linked to the Russian effort: Steve Bannon (then the editor of Breitbart) and Cambridge Analytica were experimenting with social media to see how social groups could be manipulated online for political gain. According to Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie, Bannon asked employees to “test messaging around Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian expansion.”18 However, few in power paid attention—in part because social media companies almost never took seriously the most common targets, women of color. Had Twitter taken harassment seriously and investigated the source, this facet of the Russian effort to influence the 2016 election could have been detected early. It took Congress years to identify an intelligence operation that black women pointed out in real time. The systemic racism enabling this willful ignorance put democracy in jeopardy.
Above all else, what dominates my memory of 2014 is Ferguson. The Ferguson uprising that summer marked the divide between the tentative hope of the early 2010s demonstrations and the chaotic brutality of the rest. Like other tragedies of 2014, the Ferguson protests against police brutality were a spectacle of online voyeurism, exemplified and exploited in hashtags, and a mainstay of cable news.
But I live in St. Louis. Ferguson is not a hashtag for me, it is a town five miles from my house. Ferguson is where I sent my kids to camp and shopped at strip malls. Ferguson is where most of the workers I interviewed for my articles on the St. Louis minimum wage strikes lived. In April 2014, I published a long history of St. Louis’s impoverished black suburbs, including Ferguson, and their residents’ struggle for civil and economic rights.19 I saw Ferguson, and the surrounding area of North County St. Louis, as likely to rise up against long-standing injustices. The story of Ferguson was always there, but like most stories about St. Louis, people did not want to hear it—including many white people in the St. Louis region.
In Ferguson, the world saw St. Louis’s heartache laid bare, and decided it was something to devour and then dismiss. Ferguson was a flash point, and it hurts to live through a flash point. A flash point glimmers, it burns, sometimes so brightly it eclipses the pain of day-to-day life. And then it is gone, and you are left alone with that pain, amplified by the apathy with which it was so abruptly received.
On August 9, a St. Louis friend texted me a photo of a middle-aged black man in a tank top and jeans holding a sign, handwritten on a torn piece of cardboard, proclaiming: FERGUSON POLICE JUST EXECUTED MY UNARMED SON!!! The photo had been posted to an Instagram account and circulated throughout St. Louis social media. The man holding the sign in the photo was Louis Head, the grieving stepfather of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. Because violence is so common in St. Louis, my initial fear upon hearing of the killing was that it would not be covered, making justice for the victim’s family less likely. I was worried people wouldn’t care what had happened, and in many ways, I was right. If Ferguson taught me anything, it was that noticing and caring are two very different things.
People often say the story of Ferguson began with a body in the road. But Ferguson attracted attention not because of a body but because of a person, Michael Brown, and those who loved him—an anguished community who took to the streets and refused to leave. They were joined by a steady stream of sympathizers, and soon Ferguson dominated national headlines. Within a week, the country learned the identity of the shooter—Officer Darren Wilson—and that Brown had been unarmed. Between August and November 2014, activists demonstrated daily, calling for Wilson to be indicted for the killing of Brown. A grand jury was convened to debate Wilson’s fate, and protesters vowed to stay in the streets until justice was served. The vigil had become a protest, which became a movement.
Understanding Ferguson is not only a product of principle but of proximity. The narrative changes depending on where you live, what media you consume, who you talk to, and who you believe. In St. Louis, we still live in the Ferguson aftermath. There is no real beginning, because Brown’s death is part of a continuum of criminal impunity by the police toward St. Louis’s black residents. There is no real end, because there are always new victims to mourn. In St. Louis, there is no justice, only sequels.
Outside of St. Louis, Ferguson is shorthand for violence and dysfunction. When I go to foreign countries that do not know what St. Louis is, I sometimes joke, darkly, that I’m from a “suburb of Ferguson.” People respond like they are meeting a witness of a war zone, because that is what they saw on TV and on the internet. What they missed is that Ferguson was the longest sustained civil rights protest since the 1960s. The protest was fought on principle because in St. Louis County, law had long ago divorced itself from justice, and when lawmakers abandon justice, principle is all that remains. The criminal impunity many Americans are only discovering now—through the Trump administration—had always structured the system for black residents of St. Louis County, who had learned to expect a rigged and brutal system but refused to accept it.
In the beginning, there was hope that police would restrain themselves because of the volume of witnesses. But there was no incentive for them to do so: no punishment locally, and no repercussions nationally. Militarized police aggression happened nearly every night, transforming an already traumatic situation into a showcase of abuse. The police routinely used tear gas and rubber bullets. They arrested local officials, clergy, and journalists for things like stepping off the sidewalk. They did not care who witnessed their behavior, even though they knew the world was watching. Livestream videographers filmed the chaos minute by minute for an audience of millions. #Ferguson, the hashtag, was born, and the Twitter followings of those covering the chaos rose into the tens of thousands. But the documentation did not stop the brutality. Instead, clips were used by opponents of the protesters to try to create an impression of constant “riots” that in reality did not occur. The vandalism and arson shown on cable news in an endless loop were limited to a few nights and took place on only a few streets.
National media had pounced on St. Louis, parachuting in when a camera-ready crisis was rumored to be impending, leaving when the protests were peaceful and tame. Some TV crews did not bother to hide their glee at the prospect of what I heard one deem a real-life Hunger Games, among other flippant and cruel comments. The original protests, which were focused on the particularities of the abusive St. Louis system, became buried by out-of-town journalists who found out-of-town activists and portrayed them as local leaders. The intent was not necessarily malicious, but the lack of familiarity with the region led to disorienting and insulting coverage. Tabloid hype began to overshadow the tragedy. Spectators arrived from so many points of origins that the St. Louis Arch felt like a magnet pulling in fringe groups from around the country: Anonymous and the Oath Keepers and the Nation of Islam and the Ku Klux Klan and the Revolutionary Communist Party and celebrities who claimed they were there out of deep concern and not to get on television. Almost none of the celebrities ever returned.
In fall 2014, the world saw chaos and violence, but St. Louis saw grief. Ask a stranger in those days how they were doing and their eyes, already red from late nights glued to the TV or internet, would well up with tears. Some grieved stability, others grieved community, others simply grieved the loss of a teenage boy, unique and complex as any other, to a system that designated him a menace on sight. But it was hard to find someone who was not grieving something, even if it was a peace born of ignorance. It was a loss that was hard to convey to people living outside of the region. I covered the Ferguson protests as a journalist, but I lived it as a St. Louisan. Those are two different things. It is one thing to watch a region implode on TV. It is another to live within the slow-motion implosion. When I would share what I witnessed, people kept urging me to call my representative, and I would explain: “But they gassed my representative too.”20
A few days before Thanksgiving, Bob McCulloch—a prosecutor with a history of being biased in favor of police—sauntered into an evening press conference and declared that no charges would be brought against Wilson.21 Nothing would be done to punish the killer of a teenage boy whose corpse was left in the blazing sun for four and a half hours. That November night, St. Louis the region erupted with predictable fury. Buildings were burned, activists were gassed, residents barricaded themselves inside their homes and wept. Everything about it felt sick—the mix of inevitability and uncertainty, the feeling of being watched but not seen. During the three months McCulloch had been making his case for Wilson’s innocence, two more St. Louis black men, Kajieme Powell and VonDerrit Myers, were killed by police. A movement born in grief kept gaining martyrs.
In 2016, a locally well-known Ferguson protester, Darren Seals, wrote in a Facebook post: “Black death is a business. Millions and millions flowing through the hands of these organizations in the name of Mike Brown yet we don’t see any of it coming into our community or being used to help our youth. I’ve been calling out this shit for months. People see this as an opportunity to not only build a name but make bank at the expense of the lives of people like me.”22 Seals complained about how out-of-town NGOs and online celebrities associated with Black Lives Matter had gained attention off the Ferguson brand, used that attention to raise money, and then left with the resources meant to help St. Louis—a slight St. Louis regional activists, who had suffered severe psychological and economic hardship as a result of the protests, never forgot, as it devastated their community even further. Soon after his post, Seals was shot to death in his car, which was then set on fire. His murderer was never found. But his killing set off another Ferguson media frenzy, and the media Seals derided for their apathy toward the plight of black men created clickbait from his death.
When I look back at Ferguson now, I look back not only at Brown, who I did not know, but at dead friends and acquaintances like Seals. I look back at protesters who died due to the common reasons people die young in St. Louis: murder, denial of health care, self-medication through drugs—and whose conditions were made worse by the trauma they experienced during months of protest, and the lack of care they received in the aftermath. In July 2019, a famed Ferguson protest leader, Bruce Franks, who had been elected to Missouri’s legislature in 2016 in an underdog win, announced he was resigning from politics and leaving the region to try to heal. “If I don’t make this move, St. Louis is going to kill me,” he said.23 The trauma endured during Ferguson was worsened by the exploitative way violence against black and brown protesters was portrayed and consumed by mass media. At times the voracious consumption reminded me of postcards from a century ago showing white crowds cheerfully watching lynchings.
The Ferguson protests turned some local activists into online stars—the worst kind of celebrity, the kind that gives you notoriety but no protection. One of my friends, Bassem Masri, was a Palestinian-American livestreamer who achieved brief national fame for his passionate speeches denouncing police brutality and racism. Bassem was a sweet and generous person, a friend who checked in on my family when we fell on hard economic times. In November 2018, Bassem died of a heart attack at age thirty-one, and he too became the subject of online news stories full of conspiracy theories and vitriol. When one of my friends from the Ferguson movement dies, I am forced to process their death in two ways: through my own grief, and through the media coverage of distant reporters seeking to again capitalize off the Ferguson brand, pretending to care about the local activists they disregarded in daily life. There are not words for the double conscious agony of this experience.
The most reliable export of St. Louis is pain; its most reliable import is predators. All I have asked since 2014 is to stop treating people like prey, and it’s not a request made out of sanctimony but a plea for survival. It’s a request that goes out to everyone; it’s a request that underlays everything I write. Michael Brown lost his life because Darren Wilson denied him his basic humanity. The casualties that followed included activists who refused to accept that dehumanization as the final say. To protest dehumanization, in the digital media era, is to risk your own life. It’s to make yourself a target in a medium that distorts and devours you until you are no longer recognized as real.
At the one-year anniversary of the Ferguson events, reporters began relaying the lies of a new commentator: presidential candidate Donald Trump. Speaking at an Iowa news conference, he proclaimed, “You know a lot of the gangs that you see in Baltimore and in St. Louis and Ferguson and Chicago, do you know they’re illegal immigrants? They’re here illegally,” Trump said. “And they’re rough dudes. Rough people.”24
Trump’s comments were not tethered to reality in any way. Undocumented immigrants make up less than 1 percent of the population of Missouri and the foreign-born population of Ferguson is 1.1 percent. Given that the Ferguson protests were filmed around the clock for months on end, one would think someone would have noticed the presence of roving immigrant gangs. But Trump’s comments were covered nonetheless, simply because he said them.
Trump had spent his life spreading dangerous racist myths and his comments on Ferguson only continued this lifelong libel streak. In 1989, he notoriously took out a newspaper ad in multiple newspapers, including the New York Daily News, calling for the execution of five black and Latino boys, the Central Park Five, who were falsely accused of rape and battery.25 Accompanying his racist rhetoric about the Central Park Five and deceitful commentary on Ferguson, was his fervent multiyear “birther” campaign against President Obama. Starting around 2010, Trump began claiming Obama was not born in America and was therefore an illegitimate president. This theory gained traction at the behest of Trump and his lawyer, Michael Cohen, who ordered the lies to be printed in the National Enquirer.26 It was then amplified by a network of Republicans and racists. New right-wing websites trafficked in racist propaganda, which was then echoed by the Tea Party at rallies and online. The website Breitbart, established in Israel in 2007 by the American libertarian Andrew Breitbart,27 became more bigoted and conspiracy-oriented after Breitbart died suddenly in 2012 and was replaced with future Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon.
But the peddling of the birther myth was not limited to right-wing extremist sites. As I mentioned in chapter 2, in the early days of the internet most news sites were a replication of print. While flawed in many ways, this system still employed fact-checking as a standard practice. During the 2000s, print media and online media coexisted uneasily, with the latter often being dismissed as inherently unreliable. By the 2010s, the media industry had been so gutted by the recession that it relied on online clickbait for profit, creating an echo chamber of lies. Decontextualized tweets began to appear in articles in lieu of interviews with people whose statements—and even existence—were verified. An article would then be written about that article, and then another article about that article. Discernment was rejected for speed. All information was news, and all news was now fit to print. If a statement was uttered on television by someone famous, it was worth an article, even if the statement was untrue. Trump understood this system and capitalized on it, spreading the birther myth across cable news and onto the internet, and from his Twitter account to cable news: his own ouroboros of bullshit.
The internet strategy of Trump’s team is reminiscent of “the Big Lie,” a theory of control employed by the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler—whose speeches Trump long kept by his bedside28—praised the strength of this mechanism and used it to turn a country against itself. He describes it as such: “In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility, because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily. Thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”29
The big lie, today, finds its strength in numbers—in bots created by propaganda ministries, validated by retweets and trending topics, and repeated through aggregated content. The big lie is not only big in its audacity, but in its pervasiveness. The big lie goes unquestioned not only because of the authority behind it, but because assumptions about media integrity endured just long enough for people like Trump to use them to their advantage. Would so many outlets really reprint claims so obviously false, knowing that repetition, even in the process of rebuttal, was what made the lies linger? The answer was yes, and Republicans and racists reaped the benefits.
Birtherism was never about where Barack Obama came from. It was about where he was allowed to go. Power, for Trump, a wealthy real estate scion, was rooted in birthright, and birthright was inseparable from race. In the last few chapters, I laid out networks of nepotism and power: almost everyone in them is not only wealthy, but white. As the son of a Kenyan, bearing the middle name Hussein, Obama shattered the image of what an American president could be. To many Americans, this change was exhilarating. To wealthy white men of limited merit, who had long benefited from racial and ethnic exclusion, it was a threat—and a rich source of propaganda. As the false recovery from the 2008 crash wore on, Trump insisted to white people that illegitimate outsiders, including Obama, had taken what should have been theirs. In ways both overt and subtle, Trump promoted whiteness as assurance of immunity from hard times.
The overt racism stoked by Trump and his cohort was reflected in major policy changes. Racism never fixes itself. Throughout US history, bigotry has had to be constrained through law, often through measures that were unpopular with white people at the time. Whiteness was always social and economic currency in America, and the myth of a “postracial” society after Obama’s win was as illusory as the myth of a post-2008 economic recovery. These twin myths enabled a crisis that liberal power brokers did not seem to recognize, even though it is the classic path to demagoguery. They did not see the danger of a rise in bigotry coinciding with an explosion of economic pain—or how savvy political operatives could play the two off each other if the law did not constrain their malicious intent.
During Obama’s tenure, the inability of lawmakers to see US society for what it was shattered the rights of vulnerable Americans. Two major Supreme Court rulings—the 2010 Citizens United ruling and the 2013 partial repeal of the Voting Rights Act (VRA)—shifted power away from the people and into the hands of elites with extremist views and shady foreign ties. The long-term domestic agenda of the radical right, aimed at disempowering ordinary people and especially people of color, made gains while other threats—like transnational organized crime—exacerbated them. People like Paul Manafort were ideal stewards of this new machinery, and the lack of attention given to them when it mattered is, in the worst sense, a validation of their skill.
The Citizens United ruling allowed dark money to dominate elections, removing accountability and transparency from the process and allowing not only corporations but foreign money to shape the political process. Kremlin-affiliated oligarchs poured money into the National Rifle Association, which then dispersed it to their preferred Republican candidates under the guise of American donorship. This meant that many Republicans—and some Democrats—took money that had likely been collected and laundered by the Russian mafia, as well as by other international criminal operations; an act that renders them either witting or unwitting actors in a criminal plot, and possibly even targets of blackmail by those who carved out the cash.
Meanwhile, the partial repeal of the VRA—which the Supreme Court passed with a statement saying that protections against racism were no longer necessary, one month before George Zimmerman was acquitted for murdering Trayvon Martin—allowed states to pass new repressive voter ID laws that disenfranchised black and Latino voters. In Wisconsin, over two hundred thousand voters were blocked from the polls. Clinton lost the state by only twenty-three thousand votes.30 There are many ways to rig an election. This one was carried out in plain sight, under the auspices of lawmakers who proclaimed America to be well and good. The bedrock of autocracy is laid with the abdication of vigilance.
In December 2012, Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, named for Russian tax accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Russian federal prison after exposing large-scale theft from the Russian state, sanctioned and carried out by Russian officials. Magnitsky had been tortured and deprived of medical care before his sudden death at age thirty-seven. The Magnitsky Act was intended to bar Russian officials believed to be associated with his death from entering the United States or using its banking system. In 2012, the bill passed overwhelmingly through a bipartisan resolution, which Magnitsky’s American advocate, Bill Browder, attributed to the fact that there “wasn’t a pro-Russian-torture-and-murder lobby to oppose it.”31
Times have changed.
The Magnitsky Act was one of the few serious attempts by Congress to curb Russian organized crime and influence-peddling during the Obama administration. During his 2012 presidential debate with Mitt Romney, Obama laughed off the Russian threat, telling Romney: “The 1980s called—they want their foreign policy back.”32 But even after the dangers of Putin’s Russia were clear, the administration did little to combat them. Obama’s second term was particularly egregious in its dereliction of duty. In 2013, Russia gave shelter to Edward Snowden, an NSA employee who had fled there with an enormous cache of stolen classified documents. In 2014, Russia invaded Crimea and then held an illegal referendum that allowed the Kremlin to annex Ukraine territory. In 2015, Russia committed war crimes in Syria and began its illicit influence operations in Western elections—not only in the United States, but in the United Kingdom prior to the Brexit referendum. Before and while this was happening, the Obama administration continued to cut funding for research on the former Soviet Union and did not behave as if its actions posed a serious threat to the United States.
At the time, this negligence seemed of a piece with Obama’s lack of interest in the former USSR as well as his obligation to confront a cavalcade of other disasters: in particular, Syria, ISIS, and domestic crises like the recession and a sharp rise in gun violence. But when does complacency turn into complicity? The Obama administration was far from unique in its lenience toward corrupt Russian actors. James Comey had removed Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich from the FBI Ten Most Wanted list in late 2015, right when Trump’s lackeys Felix Sater and Michael Cohen were conspiring to bring him into power with Putin’s assistance. Meanwhile, members of the GOP were actively pursuing financial and personal relationships with Russian oligarchs, mafiosos, and spies. Some of these relationships were revealed during Mueller’s investigation, and showed ties going back years and even decades. Again, where was law enforcement when it mattered?
Throughout Obama’s second term, Trump solidified his already strong relationship with the Kremlin and related parties. In November 2013, Trump hosted the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in concert with the Agalarov family, Azerbaijani-Russian billionaires who are also associates of the Kremlin.33 “Do you think Putin will be going to the Miss Universe pageant in November in Moscow?” Trump tweeted that June. “If so, will he become my new best friend?”34
Three years later, in June 2016, the lawyer of the Agalarovs, Rob Goldstone, attended Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous Trump Tower meeting with other Kremlin allies and Trump campaign members. At this meeting, they discussed easing the sanctions that had been enforced by the Magnitsky Act presumably in exchange for Russia helping to ensure a Trump victory.35
The sheer volume of Trump officials who have done and are still doing questionable business with Russian oligarchs is startling. In 2013, Exxon chief and future secretary of state Rex Tillerson received the Order of Friendship medal from Putin.36 In 2018, Trump legal lackey Rudy Giuliani was asked to register as a foreign agent by the Senate due to his work for entities affiliated with Ukraine’s Kremlin-affiliated Party of Regions, the same party for which Manafort worked.37 Attorney General Bill Barr worked for the law firm representing Alfa-Bank, which was a target of the Mueller probe, and received money from Vector group, a holding company with deep financial ties to the Russian state.38 Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was a target of Senate inquiry due to his financial ties to oligarchs Len Blavatnik and Oleg Deripaska, the latter for whom he relieved sanctions when he took over at Treasury in defiance of congressional rulings.39
Then there are the campaign managers. One can start, of course, with Paul Manafort, whose entire career was dedicated to the pursuit of blood money, including his years in the 2010s spent working as an operative in Ukraine alongside GOP consultant (and now convicted felon) Rick Gates in order to benefit a pro-Kremlin candidate, while doing the bidding of Russian oligarch Deripaska on the side. Manafort was not the only campaign manager from the 2016 election to engage in this activity. Multiple political operatives from both sides of the aisle have worked for Kremlin allies, oligarchs, and mobsters, including Bernie Sanders’s chief strategist Tad Devine, liberal lobbyist Tony Podesta (the brother of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman John Podesta), and Lanny Davis, a family friend of and former consultant for the Clintons. In 2018, Davis, an attorney, was simultaneously representing oligarch Dmitry Firtash, who has been indicted on racketeering and worked with Mogilevich, and Michael Cohen, who is linked to Mogilevich through his family’s business connections.40
Then there is the FBI. During the Bush and Obama eras, two former heads of the FBI, William Sessions and Louis Freeh, began working as attorneys for the Russian mafia they used to fight. In 1997, Sessions traveled to Moscow and came back warning the world that the Russian mafia, headed by Semion Mogilevich, posted a severe threat to global stability—but a decade later, Mogilevich became his client. Louis Freeh, who succeeded Sessions, took on Russian clients including Prevezon, a real estate firm accused by the US government of laundering more than $200 million in a Russian tax fraud scheme, after his tenure in the FBI ended. Prevezon is the same company whose scandal culminated in the death of Sergei Magnitsky.41
Most of this activity is technically legal, but exceptionally strange. The Magnitsky Act was supposed to punish oligarchs and curb their influence. It offered clear moral and legal guidelines, and its importance as a foundational document was enhanced when Russia illicitly influenced our election and helped install a Kremlin puppet as president. Why did so many officials who had sworn to protect the United States, including two FBI heads, go on to work with the Russian mafia? Why would this be an attractive prospect after they themselves had alerted the world to the mafia’s danger? There are plenty of routes to personal profit. Why choose the one that is in direct ethical conflict with current US policy and may endanger your country?
As American officials capitulated, Russian oligarchs shored up influence through other means. They spent the postrecession era investing in US banks, corporations, real estate, social media companies, and nongovernmental organizations, to the point that the head of the Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative, an American organization dedicated to exposing the threats of kleptocratic regimes to civic life, quit in protest when it was found that the Kleptocracy Initiative was secretly bankrolled by Ukrainian-born oligarch Len Blavatnik.42
The Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. The foundation of this edifice was formed not when Trump took office, but decades before, through prolonged engagement with criminal or criminal-adjacent actors linked to hostile regimes, in particular, the Kremlin and its oligarch network.
For a few years after my Ph.D., I served on occasion as an expert witness in court for asylum seekers from authoritarian states in Central Asia, some of whom had escaped the Andijon massacre. I did not get paid for this work. I did it because people needed help, and I was one of few people who could give it. One family paid me with a home-cooked Uzbek meal—one that was delicious and went on for several hours, as home-cooked Uzbek meals tend to do.
Another man couldn’t afford to give me anything. But after he became a US citizen, he wrote me a letter of gratitude that I used to look at when I was feeling bad. It reminded me that I had done something indisputably good: I had helped save a man’s life. After Trump was elected, that man wrote me again, because he was terrified he was going to be placed on the Muslim registry. I hadn’t saved anyone. I had fucked it all up, I had helped him go from one hell to another, a hell that now endangered me, too. The nightmares I had been fending off had come home in the form of the Trump administration: a white supremacist kleptocracy linked to a transnational crime syndicate, using digital media to manipulate reality and destroy privacy, led by a sociopathic nuke-fetishist, backed by apocalyptic fanatics preying on the weakest and most vulnerable as feckless and complicit officials fail to protect them.
You can be prepared for something but that does not make the pain of it any less: the pain you feel for others, or the pain you feel inside, the pain you push away daily because if you gave in to it you would never get out. You lie to your children all day because you have to tell the truth in public, and because your heart can’t bear breaking theirs.
The truth you tell is what the world does not want to hear. People are afraid, and fear makes them furious. You become the object of their wrath because the real threat feels unstoppable. When they’re angry, they send you graphic threats and tell you that will be your fate if you keep talking about investigations or indictment or impeachment. When they feel good, they offer you their delusions born of fear and nostalgia and groupthink, a category they like to call “hope.” When they are desperate, they rhapsodize about secret saviors and their impenetrable agendas to fix it all, insisting that things cannot be this bad, that there must be sealed indictments and steady hands. They sing you a liturgy of “trust the plan” and you want to cover your ears and scream but you know in a few months, when the plan falls apart and the saviors are revealed as empty vessels, they are going to need someone to listen to them about that too.
You know what’s coming but you don’t know how to stop it. There’s no logic to this orchestration, there’s just raw power, and you, with your stripped-down city and low-down life, seem to have the exact wrong amount: enough to make the wrong people angry, not enough to make the right people act. When you write, you imagine the censorship of your material as you go, wondering how many times the word “allegedly” will get slapped on these cold hard facts. You realize this is how your writer friends in autocratic states tell you they write their works too, and you try to shake the mind-set off, but it’s impossible. Despite your sanctimonious struggle, it still got you, it’s inside you: you’ve arrived.
You wonder if—should things go the way they tend to go for people like you at times like these—if the new deep fake technology will alter you in your digital afterlife, so that you never said the things you said and never did the things you did. You wonder whether your children will see it and if they will be able to tell truth from fantasy when you are not around to teach them anymore. You cannot believe people still talk about the legacy of leaders like it constitutes leverage—like the future is going to be real, like the continuum hasn’t been disrupted, like the ability to erase the past were not easier than ever before.
You wish you lived in a time when people were more haunted by the past than by the future.
The television tells you not to stress so much, there’s a plan, take it easy, there’s a plan, of course officials would never just let this happen, of course they hadn’t been letting it happen for your entire life. You look to your leaders, since they must have some value: after all, everyone is so into being followers these days. Most leaders have gone ominously silent on the obvious threat, but you find some unexpected advice on dealing with stress from Donald Trump. The quote is from Trump’s 2004 CNN interview with Larry King, who you remember as a celebrity interviewer from your childhood but who was paid $225,000 in 2011 to do a puff piece interview with a Kremlin-friendly oligarch and whose show now airs on Russian state media, because seemingly everyone on earth now has a side hustle with the Kremlin.43 But since calming down and obeying the leader are the orders of the day—the orders, repeated like the drumbeat of a racing heart—you decide to see what he has to offer:
Caller: I’d like to know how you handle your stress.
Trump: I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn’t matter—like you do shows, you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter.44
You try to tell yourself that this interview doesn’t matter either. But of course, it does. It all matters. And you’re locked alone again in realization, staring into the tunnel at the end of the light.