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| France: Extreme Right-Wing Populists cheered on by the Kremlin |
Weekend after weekend, French President Emmanuel Macron is dealing with
sometimes violent protests from a populist movement known as the gilets
jaunes (yellow vests). The protesters were galvanized by a plan to raise
gasoline taxes, but they are still out in the streets even though the
gas tax increase has been suspended. Now they’re demanding, among other
things, default on the public debt, exit from the European Union and
NATO, and less immigration. I’m dealing with a piece of the online
fallout — and in the process learning a dispiriting lesson about how
hard it is for a political leader to pursue a moderate path in an age of
extremes.
On Dec. 3, amid pictures of burning cars and tear gas in Paris, I woke
up to find incessant Twitter criticism of an article I’d written. This
was hardly shocking; I’m attacked online all the time. What surprised me
was that I was being attacked for a Commentary
article published 18 months earlier, shortly after Macron’s election. I posted it on
Twitter
on June 15, 2017, with the headline: “To defeat populism, America needs
its own Macron — a charismatic leader who can make centrism cool.”
This tweet has now earned me a torrent of online abuse. Sean Davis, the co-founder of a pro-Trump website,
tweeted: “This 2017 column is a riot.” The right-wing actor James Woods
retweeted
the article with the gloating tag line: “Twitter is beautiful.”
Left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald apparently thought my article was
so ridiculous he
retweeted it without any comment at all. Breitbart’s former London editor
wrote: “This aged well, didn’t it, @maxboot?”
I asked the information warfare expert Molly McKew what was going on. She
replied:
“Major Russian info campaign on the Yellow Jackets/Vests protests, so
you just kicked the wrong hornets. Over the weekend all the ‘Syria’
accounts were tweeting about how French had snipers on the rooftops to
shoot the demonstrators.” The
Hamilton 68 website,
which tracks Russian disinformation online, confirmed that two of the
top Russian hashtags were “giletsjaune” and “France.” Among the Russians
cheerleading the protests online is the notorious fascist and pro-Putin
ideologue Alexander Dugin. Meanwhile, Russian state media outlets such
as RT were
hyping chaos in Paris as if it were a “color” revolution.
BuzzFeed
reports
that the “yellow vests” emerged out of “Anger Groups” that popped up on
Facebook to channel the grievances of “fed up” rural, working-class
French people — the Gallic version of President Trump’s deplorables or
the tea party. Just as in the United States, their online propaganda
included a great deal of misinformation. Activists circulated a picture
of cars stranded on a highway, claiming it showed German motorists who
had abandoned their cars to protest fuel taxes. In fact, the picture was
likely of a traffic jam in China. Another popular meme claimed that a
2016 government decree had invalidated the French constitution and that
everything that has happened since, including the gas tax, is
illegitimate.
There is no evidence that I have seen that Russia social media ignited the protests, but they certainly added fuel to the fire.
But Macron’s desire to curb global warming (the goal of the higher gas
tax), his support for the European Union and NATO, his unabashed elitism
(he once worked for the Rothschild investment bank, a bogeyman for
anti-Semites), and his clashes with Trump have made him a target of the
far right, too. Trump himself applauded the protests, falsely
claiming
they are chanting, “We want Trump.” The right would like to see Marine
Le Pen take over; the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The Kremlin would prefer
either one to a centrist who will stymie its designs to divide Europe.
Read more: In France and online, extremists put centrism to the torch - The Washington Post
