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by Daniel Chaitin, Deputy News Editor |
| March 17, 2022 04:50 PM
Popular Twitter account “Anonymous” warned history “will not be kind” to “Russian asset” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The famous hacktivist group account boasting 7.9 million followers, which is waging a “cyber war” against Russia amid its invasion of Ukraine, sent an ominous message to the congresswoman, who has been accused of being a “useful idiot” for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Russian asset Marjorie Taylor Greene will go down in history as one of the dumbest politicians ever. History will not be kind to you, nor will we,” the account tweeted Thursday, along with a hashtag for Anonymous.
The tweet came in response to Greene chastising Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of The Bulwark, who accused her of recommending “betting against America.”
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Anonymous, which has multiple social media accounts associated with the group of hackers, has claimed responsibility for disabling Russian websites, putting video footage of the war in Ukraine on Russian state TV, and hacking a Russian censorship agency while releasing 360,000 files.
“Anonymous has proven to be a very capable group that has penetrated some high value targets, records and databases in the Russian Federation,” wrote Jeremiah Fowler, the co-founder of cybersecurity company Security Discovery, in a blog post summarizing an examination of the cyberattacks against Russia.
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A layer cake of misinformation, dishonesty and pro-Russia apologism
By Philip BumpNational correspondent
Yesterday at 10:21 a.m. EDT
You would be forgiven if you did not hear that a national political figure addressed the nation about the war in Ukraine on Wednesday night. The figure was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), the right-wing, first-term backbencher. The address was not carried on any major broadcast network or even any major cable channel; instead, it was hosted on Facebook Live. It was an address to the nation in the sense that anyone broadcasting live on Facebook is addressing the nation. It was an address to the nation in the sense that any of your tweets is a message delivered to the world.
What’s changed about Greene since her days as a rabble-rousing promoter of conspiracy theories and misinformation is simply that she now does the same thing with the trappings of officialdom. Her comments about the war in Ukraine have the slightly elevated weight of coming from a member of Congress, albeit it one with less actual political power than perhaps any other official on Capitol Hill. But they were presented as though she was the elected president — which, I suppose, she, to some extent, is. She is the leader of the very specific and not-very-big subset of Americans: those who accept on faith any criticism of the political left.
Greene’s power is so diminished that covering her comments runs a real risk of simply giving them an elevated platform. Only about 15,000 people watched her address, according to Facebook’s public metrics, so it’s safe to assume that you were not among them. (Also because you’re reading an article at The Washington Post, whose audience, I believe, is necessarily a bit more discerning in picking its sources of information.) The 10-minute riff, though, distills a very specific and not entirely uncommon worldview that has emerged since Russia invaded Ukraine and is worth assessing from that perspective alone.
So let’s assess.
Greene begins with the assertion that coverage of the invasion of Ukraine is accompanied with “the drumbeat of war,” implying, as have people like Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, that the attention being paid to Russia’s incursion is simply a function of eagerness for America to enter the fray. If anything, of course, the situation is quite different: American leaders have been trying to figure out how to assist Ukraine without risking direct conflict with a nuclear-armed state led by an unpredictable autocrat. But at its heart, Greene’s presentation is about taking the various stringy theories she’s accumulated and weaving something Congress-y out of them. “Drumbeat of war” is something a Serious Politician would Intone About during a National Address, and so here it is.
“We’re told that we have an urgent moral responsibility to send money and munitions to a country 6,000 miles away,” Greene continues, emphasizing that dramatic distance, “a country that just coincidentally Joe Biden has business interest in, as do many other people.” (Ukraine is actually only about 4,000 miles from the United States. For reference, the distance from the northwestern part of Alaska to the tip of Florida is about 4,500 miles.)
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weehingthong 