If Russian state media is quoting you, it’s probably a sign that you’ve overshot the normal fair-minded range of debating U.S. policies.
A friend who keeps an eye on Russia’s propaganda notes that the Heritage Foundation is by far the most-quoted D.C. think tank in Russian media, and even worse, certain arguments from Heritage’s research are becoming frequently quoted on propaganda sites run by the Russian government and Putin’s allies.
Back in August, Heritage contended that “Biden gave $700 to Hawaii victims, but he took $900 from them and sent it to Ukraine.”
As our Dominic Pino observed, that’s not really accurate. About $41 billion of the $70 billion that the U.S. has sent or committed to Ukraine so far is in the form of military equipment, often surplus or scheduled to be sent to the scrap heap, and the U.S. government money spent is to replenish U.S. stocks with upgraded state-of-the-art modern replacements. So the U.S. is taking some of that $900 and using it to purchase replacement weapons for the Pentagon, not “sending it to the Ukrainians.” Also, as Dominic noted, while $900 per household sounds like a lot, it’s a drop in the bucket in terms of overall spending, the deficit, and the debt; the U.S. government spent $39,100 per household on Covid relief. There are 127.9 million households in the U.S., so every time the federal government spends $1 billion on anything, it is spending $7.81 per household.
But the Russian government loves to talk about that statistic.
- Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, quotes the $900 Heritage statistic on the Russian Foreign Ministry website and references Heritage.
- The Lavrov quote pops up in Tass, the state-owned news agency. Many Western media agencies have separated themselves from TASS since the full-scale invasion in response to Tass’s biased reporting.
- Zvezda, the news site of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, uses a clip from “The Kevin Roberts Show” of him being interviewed by Victoria Coates.
My friend found that Brookings and Cato were quoted a couple of times in Russian media, but not on the government-owned websites. There were no quotes or mentions of the American Enterprise Institute, Aspen Institute, Carnegie Endowment for Peace, CSIS, Johns Hopkins, New America Foundation, Progressive Policy Institute, or Wilson Center.
Now, with the rare exception*, the policy wonks, managers, and staffers who work at the Heritage Foundation are not bad folks. It’s not evil, or inherently bad, or inherently pro-Putin to ask whether the provided U.S. aid has created the results we want so far, what the U.S. interest in the war is, and what the long-term goal of U.S. policies is. Our tradition of free debate of government policies at home and abroad means we must be free to doubt or criticize any particular course of action.
But with all that said . . . if I ever said or wrote something that Russian state media started approvingly quoting, I’d want to take a shower.
You see, Russian state media isn’t just the usual “Dear Leader has led us to another record grain harvest” propaganda and cheerleading found in authoritarian regimes. What Russians see on their televisions every night is an endless geyser of bilious hateful sludge where proposals for the wholesale eradication of the Ukrainian people get tossed around as casually as evening greetings. One host called for “Ukrainian children to be drowned or burned alive.” A state Duma member said of the Ukrainian forces, “they will keep bluntly crawling forward, like roaches, until all of them get squashed.” Another host asked, “why aren’t we destroying them like rats?”(Notice how frequently Ukrainians are labeled animals, a deliberately dehumanizing rhetorical tactic.) One of Russia’s children’s rights commissioners declared, “They [Ukrainians] have to be destroyed and that’s it! Because it would be a compromise with the devil.” (Is there anything more illustrative of the state of Russian culture under Putin than a children’s rights commissioner calling for genocide?)
Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw-Haw would find the Russian state TV rhetoric a little over the top.
There are a lot of places where an American think tank can take pride in being quoted. Russian state television isn’t one of them.
The Heritage Foundation can’t control whether Russian state media quotes them or in what context. But if Russian state media is quoting you, it’s probably a sign that you’ve overshot the normal fair-minded range of debating U.S. policies, and strayed, perhaps inadvertently, into the territory of giving Putin’s regime useful fodder. And left, right, or center, interventionist or isolationist, hawk or dove, nobody wants to make Vladimir Putin’s job any easier.
The irony is, at least as far as I can tell, a good chunk of Heritage remains staunchly and vocally opposed to Putin and his regime.
Last June, Heritage quoted our old friend Lee Edwards on how we can deal effectively with Putin only if we recognize how much he is in thrall to Marxism-Leninism. In March, James Jay Carafano wrote about the Bromance between Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi, and declared, “Now is exactly the time for the U.S. to place maximum strain on its relationship with Beijing.” Around the same time, Dakota Wood warned, “In responding to war, half measures and tepid, delayed assistance lengthen the duration of conflict, increase the amount of destruction, add to suffering, and make war harder to end. Risk aversion encourages one’s enemy to be more aggressive, rather than less so. It invites bellicosity, threats, and escalation.”
And you can object to U.S. aid in a way that doesn’t imply or state that standing against Putin is a waste of time. When John Venable objected to F-16s in April, his argument wasn’t that Ukraine wasn’t worth helping, but that using those planes wasn’t practical — “while the sentiment behind giving Ukraine U.S. F-16s is noble, sending even the best fourth-generation fighters to face a fifth-generation SAM threat would be a costly mistake and have virtually no impact on the war. U.S. strategy should focus on giving the Ukrainians more air defense systems, such as the Patriot system, to deny Russian airpower, while continuing to supply them with the artillery, rockets, and tanks required to take the fight to that enemy.”
There’s some ninny out there who’s going to characterize this as “Jim attacks the Heritage Foundation.” Nah, it’s just that when an American talks about Ukraine, you don’t want to hand Putin any tools to make his job easier. In the $900 figure, it looks pretty clear that Heritage stepped over that line.
*Other than the occasional former friend who’s devolved into a spineless cheap-shot hack who labels critics of Putin and Russian military aggression as “pro-war publications,” the sort of characterization you make if you’ve got mashed potatoes where your mind and conscience ought to be.