When Britain faced extinction in June 1940, it mounted a covert psyops campaign here to buck up Americans. Who's going to do it this time?

In 1940, Britain had its back to the wall. The Nazis had flown over and around France’s supposedly impregnable Maginot Line and seemed poised for an invasion of the island fortress, delayed only by heroic Spitfire and Hurricane pilots. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was desperate to get America into the fight, but his friend President Franklin Roosevelt’s hands were tied: U.S. public opinion was overwhelmingly isolationist, and after a decade of deep, scarring unemployment, millions of Americans—and Europeans, too—were questioning whether capitalist democracies were any good. An American Nazi movement had held a huge rally in Madison Square Garden. 

Churchill’s answer: a covert operation, with Roosevelt’s connivance, to change U.S. public opinion. Led by a Canadian agent, William Stephenson, the blandly named British Security Coordination team opened an office in Manhattan and began pumping out “news” to both witting and unwitting U.S. news organizations and columnists. Some of it was derogatory gossip about isolationist leaders, such as the hugely popular fascist sympathizer and legendary cross-Atlantic pilot Charles A. Lindbergh. The team also planted black propaganda stories with about Nazi horrors and British military heroics, some real, some entirely fabricated—i.e., ”fake news”—to generate sympathy for, and confidence in, the U.K.’s determination not to surrender to Hitler.

How effective the effort was became moot 18 months later, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on the U.S. and millons of young men lined up to enlist. But it certainly didn’t hurt, and may well have helped, spur U.S. sympathies for the Brits and, eventually, mass mobilization.

“Fake news,” of course, has the worst reputation among different sorts of people for different reasons. But I found myself pining for something akin to the BSC op the other day—not to inflict black propaganda on American citizens, of course—that would be morally repugnant and a grave violation of the Constitution—but something like its Cold War CIA successor, dubbed by its chief Frank Wisner “The Mighty Wurlitzer,” a covert operation to combat global Soviet subversion.

One of its key initiatives was to recruit American intellectuals, activists and journalists into the cause of promoting liberal democratic values abroad at a time when Marxism-Leninism still held some appeal, despite Soviet purges, murders and gulags. No less than feminist icon Gloria Steinem was an enthusiastic, witting participant. In 1959, she helped recruit anticommunist American students to attend a Soviet-backed youth festival in Vienna, among other activities. She was also involved with a CIA-backed literary journal. When the scheme was exposed in 1967, to widespread revulsion, Steinem was the rare figure who stood behind it.

“In my experience the agency was completely different from its image: it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable,” she told The Washington Post, according to a 2008 history of the program by British scholar Hugh Wilford. Of course, Steinem’s experience was limited to the cultural realm, far outside the agency’s participation in coups and assassination plots in that era.

Gloomy Numbers

But I digress. I brought up the BSC and Wurlitzer ops because of a growing trepidation here and abroad that our form of democratic government is facing an extinction moment.  Polls show Western Europeans also harbor deep doubts about  democracy, too (although there’s been an uptick of confidence with the election of Joe Biden). Across 27 countries polled in 2019, a median of 51% was dissatisfied with how democracy is working in their country; just 45% were satisfied. In recent years neo-fascists have been rearing their ugly heads from Charlottesville to Berlin. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, meanwhile, are touting dictator-led crony capitalism as a cure for Western ills.

“The United States is sick,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhou Lijiang jabbed on Tuesday, after Biden tried to corral NATO members into a militant statement on Beijing. “The G7 should feel its pulse and prescribe medicine for it.” Likewise, Russian state media has been belittling Thursday’s summit meeting and mocking Biden’s physical and mental health.

A Growing Cancer

But it’s America I’m most worried about, so much that I think it’s way past time for more major American institutions and personalities, from Hollywood to Broadway to pro sports and Madison Avenue, to gin up a massive public relations campaigns to reverse the extremist, seditious, right wing infiltration of the Republican Party inspired by former President Trump. Otherwise, the new White House initiative unveiled Tuesday to counter violent right wing extremist violence may well turn out to be an American version of the Maginot Line. 

The Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, say many deeply concerned, experienced observers, is looking more like a prelude than a climax, an event that may turn out to to be a replay of Adolph Hitler’s failed 1923 coup attempt, the so-called  beer hall putsch. The real thing could come if the Qanon-driven Republicans, who have overwhelmingly embraced the fantastic fiction that the 2020 election was stolen, take back the House and Senate in 2022.

“At least from where I sit, the most important and most relevant truth of the riot is that it was not the culmination of the insurrection, but its prologue,” wrote The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who’s seen a thing or two. “If the Republican Party, as currently constituted, takes back the House and Senate next year (an outcome that is not only plausible but, history tells us, likely), and if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2024, it doesn’t seem likely that Congress will certify the victory.”

Another harbinger of what’s coming in a Trumpite return to power was revealed just this week,  when emails released by  the House Oversight Committee revealed that the defeated president and his allies “repeatedly pressed senior Justice Department officials to investigate baseless conspiracy theories and challenge the results of the 2020 election,” according to the report from Axios. “On at least five occasions, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows directed DOJ officials to investigate baseless fraud claims, including a conspiracy alleging that electoral data was changed in Italian facilities with the knowledge of the CIA.”

Pro-Trump conspiracy mongers, echoed by foreign actors linked to Russia and China, relentlessly pushed the claims on Trump friendly news outlets and social media, touching off storms of indignation by rightwing partisans. By May, two-thirds of Republicans (66%) agreed that the election was stolen, according to one poll. Another found that 53 percent of Republicans believed Trump won the election and blamed his loss to Biden on illegal voting. Nearly 30 percent think Trump will be “reinstated” by year’s end, according to another poll this week.

The Fire This Time

The FBI, meanwhile, is worried that Qanon’s “digital soldiers,” frustrated that none of their shadowy leader’s predictions of government collapse and Trump’s imminent return to office have panned out,  may become violent. They might attack "perceived members of the 'cabal' such as Democrats and other political opposition—instead of continually awaiting Q's promised actions which have not occurred," the FBI assessment said.

“It does not take an armed takeover” by an organized group to do a lot of damage, Tom O’Connor, an FBI agent who investigated suspected domestic terrorists for 23 years, told SpyTalk’s Elaine Shannon last March. “It takes one person who believes they need to act. How possible is that, I ask you?” He worried that more anti-government “lone actors” are lying in wait or making plans to carry out another spectacular terrorist attack, people like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Charleston church shooter Dylan Roof and Nashville bomber Tony Warner.  Either they weren’t on the feds’ radar or local authorities didn’t take reports of their suspicious behavior seriously, multiple investigations over the years showed.  The Jan. 6 investigations and arrests—some 500 to date—have also revealed significant pockets of insurrectionist and white power sympathies in military and police forces.

A “sea change in counterterrorism” practice is coming with the Biden administration’s new plan, say Carly Gordenstein and Seamus Hughes of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

According to The Washington Post’s roundup:

The 32-page strategy seeks to coordinate efforts across the government in law enforcement and prevention, some of which were already underway. It calls for new spending at the Justice Department and FBI to hire analysts, investigators and prosecutors; greater information-sharing between the federal government and state and local partners as well as with tech companies; and addressing the factors contributing to the problem, such as systemic racism.

More money, more people: It’s a classic Washington solution. And it’s still based in a law enforcement framework.  Its main takeaway is to nudge the feds, and the general public, to consider domestic extremists as every but as much or even more of a threat to their health and safety as Islamist militants.

That’s “groundbreaking,”  Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who runs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, told The Post. But, she added,  “If we just frame the whole thing as a security and law enforcement problem, with security and law enforcement experts at the helm, we’re just going to get that outcome.”

Indeed. I call that a Maginot Line against domestic extremism—a delusion that more counterterrorism money, agents and analysts, and so forth, can root out the cancer eating at our government and society. The extremists will work around it. It took the FBI years after the 9/11 attacks to refit itself as a preemptive, as opposed to reactive, counterterrorism force, and it’s still fixated on cuffing wannabes, low level dupes, and running up the numbers. For years it’s hesitated to sound an alarm  on its own findings of white extremists in state and local police. 

The bottom line is that, to be effective, Washington—and our major institutions and  players—have to change hearts, in their own ranks and beyond. That’s the hard part; the rest seems easy in comparison.

Recently a small town sheriff in the heart of eastern Washington state’s militia country told a reporter that next year’s Republican primaries hold the key to what direction the nation is going to go. If moderates don’t show up to vote, the extremists will win and move to take the whole shebang down when they move into state houses and the U.S. Capitol.

“These are tyrants, these are true dictators that want to pull our country apart,” Spokane County sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, a Republican, said of paramilitary groups and their supporters. “And they want to hide behind, ‘Well, America was born out of revolution.’”