America’s foreign adversaries – like the Russian government, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the Islamic Republic of Iran – will use every opportunity to exploit a crisis to advance their agendas – overtly, covertly, and clandestinely. Always.
“Asymmetric warfare” by our adversaries uses unconventional tactics to gain advantages over the United States. It includes “influence,” “information,” or “psychological operations,” with the aim to shape public opinion, exacerbate societal divisions, undermine democratic institutions, and advance geopolitical objectives without direct military engagement. Why fight the enemy (at great financial and human cost) when you can collapse them from within?
During the week following conservative leader Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a “tremendous amount of disinformation” was tracked from adversarial nations that exploited Kirk’s death by weaponizing social media platforms and official foreign state media. Over 6,000 mentions of “Charlie Kirk” across state media in Russia, China and Iran were documented, recognized as being messaged for differing audiences – Russia mocked Trump supporters, pushed conspiracy theories, and blamed Zelensky (and Trump) for the assassination, Iran blamed Israel’s Mossad, and China sought to denigrate U.S. reputation and image globally, by portraying the United States as divided and violent.
Worse – anti-Western social media campaigns from Russia-aligned and CCP-supported accounts, including by bots from China, Russia, and all over the world (some of which pose as Americans), were posted to clearly deceive and incite hate, rage, division, and violence among Americans, and to portray the U.S. as a dysfunctional country in decline.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the subsequent hate-filled response by Leftists in the public eye (such as late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel) indicate that psychological operations against America are having an effect.
Other pertinent indications: two assassination attempts in 2024 against President Donald Trump; the rise and cultural/political acceptance of militant, often violent groups like Antifa and BLM; the rise and acceptance of “protestors” chanting “Intifada” on U.S. college campuses in support of the terrorist organization Hamas; the whitewashing of “thousands of often violent” anti-ICE rioters in Los Angeles, deemed “mostly peaceful” by Leftist media and politicians. It is sobering to note that both the anti-ICE and pro-Hamas protests were also backed by foreign state media pushing “narratives of American hypocrisy, instability and decline…”
Are we paying attention?
Since Kirk’s death, Russia-backed groups, including a “disinformation project,” have posted tens of thousands of fake news reports, celebrity quotes, and images “with the intent (of) inflaming passions” between conservatives and the LGBT community, and encouraging discourse about a potential civil war in the United States. Posts have been “widespread” with “high levels of engagement.”
“X” accounts run by the Chinese Communist Party, including a member of its own Propaganda Bureau with over 200,000 followers, posted negative and misleading information about the FBI’s investigation into the assassination. One called Kirk a “radical” and his assassin both “innocent” and “ruthless.” Another (with over 400,000 combined followers) called Kirk a “Nazi scumbag.” Another (with almost 200,000 followers) posted that the U.S. is a “violent country since its founding.” And another (with 82,000 followers) falsely claimed Kirk’s assassin is a “white Christian, conservative, Republican male who even donated to Trump.”
Is this where Kimmel got the idea to mock the conservative movement’s grief over the brutal shooting death of Charlie Kirk, and claim that his assassin was part of “the MAGA gang”?
Foreign influence operations against Americans exploit the open architecture of global online platforms (made more complicated by Obama’s “modernization” of the Smith-Mundt Act) to infiltrate and disrupt target societies. This phenomenon has intensified with the rise of digital technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), to enable scalable, low-cost campaigns that blur the lines between authentic discourse and state-sponsored propaganda. In fact, it’s easy: fake videos, images, graphics, voiceovers, documents, and accounts can all be used to fool, shape, and incite the American public.
The Active Measures Working Group, a U.S. government interagency organization established during the Reagan administration, was tasked with countering Soviet disinformation. The group altered the perception of disinformation within the national security community. Once thought “inconsequential,” Soviet disinformation was revealed as a real threat to U.S. foreign and domestic interests and to our success in foreign diplomatic conflicts. By exposing Soviet covert operations against the U.S., the working group effectively “raised the political cost [to disseminating disinformation] … by sensitizing foreign and domestic audiences to how they were being duped.”
Ultimately, the working group “negated” much of the Soviet Union’s multi-billion-dollar disinformation efforts, “at little cost to the United States,” helping to bankrupt Russia. A case study of the working group’s effectiveness by the U.S. National Defense University argues for a “dedicated counter-disinformation effort” in the U.S. government today. This is particularly true in the need to counteract foreign information operations that utilize easily accessible and vast online information streams.
Americans should not be ignorant – but aware – of the ongoing unconventional tactics used to undermine the goodness and strength of America and its citizens. The threat and detrimental effects of asymmetric warfare do not stop at deceiving the public, or the spread of public “disinformation” or “false claims.” Our opponents’ full strategic campaign includes destruction – by inflaming division, influencing public opinion, and enraging the minds of American citizens against their government, families, friends, traditions, values, and our founding principles. This is what destroys a civilization. We see this happening all around us, now.
Whatever side of the political aisle you’re on, you are being manipulated. The ubiquitous influence of social media has made the manipulation of Westerners by our adversaries far more effective, all with the intent of undermining the U.S. and pushing its citizens to anger and violent action. Foreign sources of asymmetric warfare against the United States want you to believe their actions are “inconsequential.”
According to reports, the U.S. Departments of State, War, Justice, and Homeland Security all have agencies or task forces combating foreign influence; however, a unified strategy appears to be lacking. Current U.S. initiatives are fragmented, reactive, and lack the singular focus of the Active Measures Working Group from the Reagan era. There must be stronger efforts from U.S. national security leaders to combat foreign influence operations and deceptive communications. Additionally, U.S. agencies must collaborate with tech companies to identify and remove accounts and posts associated with nefarious foreign-state influence groups.
This is critical: The Trump administration needs its own version of the Reagan-era Active Measures Working Group as part of U.S. national security strategy, with the sole purpose of identifying, exposing, countering, and nullifying (read “defeat”) foreign disinformation campaigns that influence American citizens and our current events.
Shea Bradley-Farrell, Ph.D. is a strategist in national security and foreign policy in Washington, D.C. and president of Counterpoint Institute for Policy, Research and Education. Her latest book is Last Warning to the West. Follow her at counterpointinstititute.org or “X” @DrShea_DC and @CounterpointDC.
