Bamboozled

Part one of two. A conservative’s reversal on Ukraine, and how an argument nobody was making showed up everywhere at once.

Laura Loomer and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kiev.

Last week, Laura Loomer went to Kyiv.

If her name means nothing to you, you should know it means a great deal to a few million people online. Loomer is a highly controversial right-wing activist who built a career out of confrontation — from spreading conspiracy theories, to being thrown out of congressional hearings to being banned and eventually reinstated on most of the major platforms to two failed runs for Congress in Florida — and has had the President’s ear (resulting in some key firings for insufficient loyalty). She is not a journalist and wouldn’t claim to be. But she is loud, and for most of the last decade that was enough to make her one of the more audible voices on the online right.

For five years, what she told her audience about Ukraine ran roughly like this: corrupt country, crawling with Nazis, not worth an American dollar. She floated the idea that Putin should just take the whole thing. She wrote op-eds for RT, the Kremlin’s English-language international network.

And then, last week, she sat across from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a camera rolling and told him she had been…

“bamboozled by Russian propaganda.”

She used to think Ukraine was full of Nazis, she said. She doesn’t anymore. Later, after a ballistic missile alert pushed her interview with the Associated Press out of her hotel and down into the building’s bomb shelter, she explained how it had happened:

Once upon a time, Laura Loomer got kicked off the conventional American social media platforms, and found herself on Telegram — because that was what was left. But what she may not have realized is that Telegram is where Russian material circulates freely. The Russians, she said, are very good at capitalizing on people’s rage. And she was angry.

She also wrote something a truth that still hasn’t been realized by many in our country:

“We have been so propagandized by Russia, and we don’t even realize it.”

Some caution is in order here. The reversal is days old and I have no idea whether it will hold. I’m not the audience for it either — I don’t trust her, and I’d be surprised if that changes. But a lot of people do, and if one conservative influencer, who has spent years vilifying Ukraine based on lies Russia fed her, can publicly make this stark of a reversal, it’s — dare I say — encouraging.

What the trip mostly left me with is a question I’ve been chewing on for four years. My entire career on Capitol Hill was spent in rooms where nobody had to be talked into the idea that Russia was our adversary.

So what happened?

I worked on Capitol Hill for Republicans for nearly 20 years. In every room I was ever in — foreign affairs meetings, staff briefings, the ordinary griping that fills an office on a Thursday afternoon — Russia was the red menace. There was no question that Putin was a bad actor and you didn’t have to argue for it.

Rush Limbaugh, perhaps the most influential conservative media figure for decades, told his audience day-after-day that Putin couldn’t be trusted (KGB man, playing a long game, any flattery drifting over from Moscow was part of the con, etc.). Millions of conservatives heard that on repeat for years — it was just a fact.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, and inside of a week I started hearing an argument I had never heard in my life.

It went like this… “Russia was actually building something enviable. A society ordered around Christian faith. A place that had refused the decadence we’d let take root here. Putin was the last man standing for a civilization the West had walked away from, and Ukraine was a corrupt client state of the same corrupt global order that had wrecked our own country.”

Hearing an argument like this was incredibly strange — most of all because it came out of nowhere. It arrived whole, talking points already attached, at the precise moment it became useful to Moscow.

In those early days of the war, I spearheaded an effort to raise a few hundred thousand dollars in charitable giving for Ukraine — food and medicine, ambulances, medical supplies, and other things you might need if there’s a hole in your apartment building. This seemed like something 100% of Congress could support, and yet I can vividly remember standing inside the Capitol listening to the Kremlin’s arguments come out of the mouth of a Member of Congress.

It made me sick, and was really beyond comprehension. Surely he couldn’t believe what he was saying, right? The only person who could repeat lies like that must be a Russian asset. But we now know there’s another explanation.

Follow the Money

On September 4, 2024, the Justice Department unsealed charges against two employees of RT. The allegation was that RT had secretly bankrolled a Tennessee company called Tenet Media to the tune of roughly $9.7 million, which was nearly every dollar the company ever took in. The money moved through an investor who didn’t exist, invented for the purpose. Tenet Media put out something close to two thousand videos and pulled more than sixteen million views on YouTube alone.

The six American commentators on Tenet’s roster were not charged with any crime — the indictment describes them as deceived. They’ve said they had editorial control and no idea whose money it was, and on that narrow question I take them at their word. The mechanics are what matter, and the mechanics work either way.

That’s the design. You never have to buy anyone. You only have to fund them.

If you’re Russia, and you want a set of arguments circulating in the American bloodstream, this is the cheap way in. Find people who already lean your direction. Then make leaning that direction extremely good business. Pay for the studio, cover the booking fees, fill the comments with agreement, push the clips. The person on camera can be entirely sincere and the operation still works. Sincerity is the product.

It wasn’t one company, either. That same day, the Treasury Department sanctioned a batch of Russian entities and individuals tied to the wider influence apparatus, among them ANO Dialog, which is on paper a Russian nonprofit and in practice was connected to something called Doppelgänger — an operation that cloned real news sites down to the fonts in order to launder Kremlin copy into Western feeds. The Justice Department seized dozens of the counterfeit domains. This is a Russian industry. It has offices and org charts and performance metrics.

I used to think of these operations as rooted in persuasion. But now I realize it’s really closer to gardening. You can’t argue a plant into growing, but you can decide what gets water and fertilizer.

The Danger at Home

What ought to worry all of us heading into November is that the ground Russia was working is ground Americans cleared ourselves.

About one in five American adults now gets news regularly from what the Pew Research Center calls news influencers. Among adults under thirty it’s more than a third. The number I’d highligh is this one: of the influencers Pew studied, roughly three-quarters have no affiliation with any news organization at all. No editor. No standards desk. No lawyer down the hall whose entire job is to say: there’s no real proof, we can’t run that.

Meanwhile the institutions that employ editors, standards desks, and lawyers down the hall are coming apart. Northwestern’s Medill School has been keeping count, and the tally is grim: the country has been losing newspapers at a rate of about two and a half a week, and we’re down roughly 3,300 of them since 2005. More than two hundred counties have no local news source at all. Something like 55 million Americans live somewhere with little or none.

Trust fell through the floor over the same stretch. Gallup’s most recent polling puts trust in mass media at 28 percent, the first time it has ever come in under thirty. Among Republicans it’s 8 percent (!). You cannot build a civic information strategy on an 8.

Then add the past two years, in which we took apart most of the government’s ability to see any of this coming. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which tracked foreign propaganda, closed at the end of 2024, and the office meant to replace it was shut down the following spring. CISA — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the people who worked alongside state and county election officials — has lost about a third of its workforce and stepped back from election security work. The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force was quietly shuttered. Stanford’s Internet Observatory, which did more public-interest research on this than anyone in the country, lost its funding under legal and congressional pressure.

You may think some of that was justified. There are serious civil liberties objections to the government sitting anywhere near questions of speech. I don’t dismiss them and neither should you. But we should also be clear-eyed about what it costs. The traditional media and government watchtowers are unmanned.

So what do we actually do?

That’s the harder question, and it’s the one I’ll take up in part two later this Saturday — what the research says works, where that research is genuinely contested, and what we’re building at Bright America to make a positive impact.