One crucial detail he forgot to mention: the segment ("Criminal Injustice") airs on Sputnik Radio. Which, in case you couldn't guess, is a subsidiary of Russian state-owned media.
When you read the Lawfare piece, moreover, it turns out not to be making any sweeping dismissal of criticisms of the U.S. prison system. Rather, it describes segments like "Criminal Injustice" and others that Sputnik produces as "often weav[ing] genuine concerns and viable grievances in with misleading narratives."
Shows of this sort, critiquing U.S. mass incarceration, etc., are among the Russian state-owned media products that are geared toward cultivating a left-wing audience. There are many others, however, that attempt to reach a very different clientele.
The Lawfare piece describes, for instance, Russian media attempts to spread false stories about Syrian refugees committing fictitious crimes, attempts to gin up xenophobia and racism through publicizing lurid accounts of violent acts allegedly perpetrated by undocumented immigrants, etc. These are, of course, stories that the president -- following scripts prepared it would seem by Stephen Miller -- seeks to repeat at every turn, violating some of the most basic norms of an open, multi-racial society in the process. (But then, as Woody Guthrie once sang, writing of Trump Senior, "I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate/ He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts[.]")
All of this propaganda appears designed, in Lawfare's credible assessment, to disrupt and delegitimize liberal democratic societies. This is also the conclusion supported by pretty much all the evidence that has emerged over the last few years about Russian electoral interference, etc.
It is of course richly ironic to see would-be critics of human rights violations in the U.S. prison system willingly collaborate with the propaganda arm of a regime known to imprison critics and assassinate dissidents, amidst a host of other crimes.
It is not, however, particularly surprising. The old practice of cultivating left-wing intellectuals as "useful dupes" appears to have simply carried straight over from the Soviet era. It turns out (and this is to a large extent the main burden of Masha Gessen's outstanding biography of Putin), KGB tactics and infrastructure far outlasted the death of communism. They regrouped and refashioned themselves to give birth to the new regime.
Faced with the bizarre example of the left-wing critic of U.S. prisons who appears on Russian state-owned media, one thinks back to a famous/notorious quote by Lillian Hellman, and one sees that history may indeed be repeating itself. In a bit of spoken dialogue that first seems to have been attributed to her in a 1996 joint biography of herself and her equally Soviet-sympathizing husband Dashiell Hammett, the great fellow-traveling playwright is alleged to have said, "If you knew what I know about American prisons, you would be a Stalinist, too."
Which then, as today, is a rather fascinating non-sequitur. As horrible and racist as the American prison system is and has long been, one would not think that the human rights of prisoners was a particularly promising point of comparison on which to defend Stalin's USSR. Does anyone remember what a gulag originally was, before it became a vivid metaphor for the United States' own ever-growing carceral apparatus?
As sad and hypocritical as the left-wing fellow-traveler of the mid-twentieth century was, however, they could at least claim the mantel of dissent. The American Communist who spoke up for civil rights will always be more admirable, in the eyes of heaven and of history, than the American conservative or liberal who was silent; just as the capitalist, counter-revolutionary, or monarchist was more admirable in Soviet Russia than the Bolsheviks who persecuted them -- the dissident at least possessing, in each case, what Graham Greene called "the virtue of disloyalty."
What's truly bizarre about the present moment, by contrast, is that segments of the American far-left have apparently clung to their devotion to Russia even when this places them in direct political alignment with the sitting U.S. president, who ran and is continuing to govern on one of the most far-right, racist platforms in modern history.
I'm sure they still tell themselves, in order to sleep at night, some narrative along the lines of "Putin may be bad, but at least he doesn't..." Just as the Stalinists used to bury themselves in Western atrocity stories in order to avoid looking too closely in the mirror.
It is hard to imagine, however, along what possible axis of left-wing values (or any human values) Putin's regime could hold up to this kind of thought-process. Apart from the murders, the election meddling, the savage wars in Chechnya and elsewhere, Putin has also cast himself as world leader of a global anti-LGBTQ crusade and of a resurgent anti-liberal backlash targeting immigrants, refugees, and Muslims, fueling the rise of neo-authoritarian regimes around the world. What's left? What else could there be to complete that sentence: "at least he doesn't..."?
Doris Lessing writes in her autobiographical novel The Golden Notebook that one of the last of the ideological crutches she used to retain her loyalty to the Communist Party (which lasted in her case past Stalin's death), was the thought that at least Stalin's regime wasn't guilty of the anti-Semitic horrors of the Nazis. She writes: "we all had some illusions—mine was that anti-Semitism [in the CP] was 'impossible'." (This illusion, too, of course, was eventually shattered during the era of Stalin's paranoid obsession with the "Doctor's Plot.")
I wonder what illusion the Sputnik-aligned far left might still be cherishing at this stage (if they have any conscience remaining that would need to be tricked or silenced in such a manner). It cannot be that they imagine that Islamophobia, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, etc. are "impossible" for Putin's regime. Putin has made himself the global face of all of these toxic hatreds, deliberately spreading them through propaganda and falsehoods in the world's temporarily democratic societies. He has also inflicted some of the most devastating wars on Muslim tribal societies of any global power, carrying them out in alignment with U.S. "War on Terror" strategy and ideology.
What makes a Soviet fellow-traveler keep on traveling, in short, when the Soviets are dead and gone, and have been replaced with a regime that embodies all of their atrocities and duplicity, with none of the ideological varnish?
No matter. The way in which the "useful idiots" of authoritarian regimes justify themselves to themselves is an intriguing psychological riddle, but not one of ultimate significance. What matters in times like these is to remember the lessons of history and to think clearly. Make sure you have freed your own mind from infiltration and propaganda first -- for only then can you help others.
I for one never thought I would live to be in this situation. I didn't think I would be faced with the infiltration of left-wing groups -- colleagues, in effect, whom I encounter in the course of my work -- by Russia-backed entities and interests masquerading as disinterested left-wing causes. I thought these were episodes from the distant past of Communist "fronts" and subterfuges -- ones that I had always found of riveting historical and intellectual interest, but not ones that I imagined would ever apply to my life.
If the years since 2015 have shown us anything, however, it is that history isn't over. And nothing is impossible.
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