Spot the Op: Othering
Part 2 in the new Bette Dangerous series ‘Spot the Op’ — identifying autocrat operations
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One thing I didn’t say on The Thom Hartmann Program yesterday was how autocratic operations and campaigns being thrown at democratic nations can be beaten with one word: unity.
Thom interviewed me on the debut post in my new series, Spot the Op. The topic was how ‘separatist’ campaigns are designed to weaken nations.
When people become more sophisticated in how the fascist playbook is being deployed, they’ll be able to better Spot the Op. Instead of allowing their communities and countries to be artificially divided, they can dig in and unite against false divisions.
Unity
Maia Sandu, President of Moldova, has been nominated for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize for defending Moldovan democracy against Russia’s information warfare attacks aimed at putting the country under Russian control. They failed, because as Monique Camarra taught us months ago, Moldovans showed unity in the face of another attempted hostile takeover. Russian spent an amount equivalent to two percent of Moldova’s GDP in its attempt to steal the country, but pro-democracy citizens thwarted the attacks.
That’s the frame I want you to have in mind in today’s Spot the Op post on the topic of ‘othering’ — a fascist technique where dehumanizing and often fake news is spread about targeted communities. The communities targeted are often immigrants, and in particular, people of color.
For this report, I’m going to draw on my ‘moral panic’ research from this post:
As Professor Jason Stanley wrote in Chapter Eight: Sexual Anxiety in his book, How Fascism Works:
In the United States at the moment of this writing, we also see a loss of “logical faculties” in the face of a barrage of propaganda connecting immigrant groups to rape. Trump famously began his campaign by denouncing Mexican immigrants to the United States as rapists. In an article for The New York Times on September 26, 2017, Caitlin Dickerson wrote about what happened in the small town of Twin Falls, Idaho, where three refugee boys, aged seven, ten, and fourteen, were accused of some kind of sexual activity with a five-year-old American girl. Immediately after the incident, Facebook groups formed about it, with links to articles on the Internet claiming “that the little girl had been gang raped at knifepoint, that the perpetrators were Syrian refugees and that their fathers had celebrated with them afterward by giving them high fives.” Soon thereafter, the headline article on the Drudge Report, one of the most visited sites on the Internet, screamed “REPORT: Syrian ‘Refugees’ Rape Little Girl at Knifepoint in Idaho.”
The articles were all false—for one thing, as Dickerson reports, no Syrian refugees were resettled in Twin Falls. It’s not clear that there was any attack at all (a police officer, based on the cellphone video of the incident, called the Internet descriptions of it “100 percent false, like not even close to being accurate”). Nevertheless, the fake news stories created a wave of intimidating harassment against public officials in Twin Falls, and a storm of outrage against refugees in the community. In short, they created moral panic about the sexual danger refugees posed for American white girls, a panic that has yet to subside.
The rhetoric on immigration that surrounded the Trump campaign (and continues to surround his administration) parallels the tactics of Russian propaganda outlets, which have spread fake news stories (as well as grossly exaggerating facts) about Middle Eastern immigrants raping white women in Europe. To take just one example, discussed in a September 2017 New York Times article by Jim Rutenberg, Russian propaganda outlets tried to create a fake scandal about a supposed rape of a thirteen-year-old girl in Berlin by a Middle Eastern immigrant in 2016. Multiple media outlets produced stories about the supposed rape, stoking outrage among the German Russian community, ultimately to the point where seven hundred people gathered to protest an event that never occurred. Russian media coverage and Russian fake news stories inflamed outrage. The fact that all of this eerily mirrors the spread of the German propaganda campaign in the 1920s of “the Black Horror on the the Rhine” should dissuade us from adopting the view, currently in vogue, that this sort of “fake news” is a consequence of the modern revolution in social media.”
Before I take you through the Horror on the Rhine origin story, I want to remind you of something buried deep in my reporting on the US indictments of Russian nationals in September 2024, who were identified as paying influencers to push Kremlin propaganda in America, as well as the granularly detailed ‘Doppelganger’ operation, which revealed the depth of Russian campaigns designed to mirror Western media.
Buried deep in the 277-page affidavit was a Russian campaign to create a rape story to pit Americans against Germans.
In a project overseen by Putin, we learn the Russians directing the doppelganger operation “took notes related to at least 20 Russian Presidential Administration meetings.”
We learn that the directors took steps to be effective in the “creating of a nuclear psychosis.” And thanks to internal documents, we found out as they plot their psychological warfare attacks on European nations, that they determined Germany was a particularly soft target.
In meeting notes, one participant suggested “trying to ‘make a fake on an American soldier that raped a German woman. That would be great!’”
To amplify their fake stories, they created media clusters of 40 to 50 websites and then their paid influencers amplified the false narratives to their audience.
They were regularly monitoring about 600 pro-Russian influencers in the US, names on a list that were never released by American intelligence. We know, of course, who some of them are, as I noted in this report:
Rather than kicking them out of the country, they’re now in the White House press pool, or being given visas to return to the US.
Justin Trudeau told us who two of them were:
‘DESTABILIZING DEMOCRACIES’: Canadian PM Names Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson as Paid By Russia
But of course, when the White House functions as a Russian troll farm, justice is far from being served.
To better understand how the White House Troll Farm is deploying ‘othering’ campaigns on the population, let’s look at what happened in Germany in the 1920s to see how the intentional cruelty of Trump, Vance, and Musk’s racist propaganda wave works.
The fake news centered around the territory west of the Rhine under Allied occupation after the Germans lost World War One. A fifth of the French soldiers came from French colonies — Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Madagascar, or Vietnam.
German propagandists went to work, creating stories of barbarism, whipping Germans into a fear-frenzy, while also rejecting the Weimar Republic and the Versailles Treaty. Igniting rage among the population, made-up stories of Black soldiers raping German women were seeded in newspapers and a propaganda campaign known as the Black Shame poisoned the country.
The images created to instigate this rage look very much like the memes we see today — racist caricatures, grotesques that could only come out of the minds of demented people.
In fact, multiple historians who documented the fact that these ‘horror’ events never happened, suggest that it was in the perverted minds of the propagandists that the real threat could be found.
Shame Campaign
According to the DW Documentary Nazi Prejudice and Propaganda “enormous amounts of money were invested in the ‘shame’ campaign Brochures were translated from English, Dutch, Swedish, French, Spanish and American, English and so on. There were postcards, illustrations, posters, medallions and plays. They even made films about it.”
Although the stories were proven demonstrably false, that truth didn’t make its way into the general population’. The ‘horror on the Rhine’ was an effective psychological campaign, inducing disgust and creating fear.
In reality, hundreds of German women and soldiers from French colonial countries fell in love and had children.
CW: And this is where I have to warn you of the content.
When Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists seized power, among the laws he enacted was the forced sterilization of mixed race children. I don’t want to use the words they used for the campaign, and I refuse to show you the exhibitions they used to promote the law because they are so f**king cruel, but I want you to know it happened. It’s important for you to know that it happened and where things can lead if cruel men are not stopped.
Sonder Kommission Nr. 3 — Special Commission Number Three
“In April 1937, Chancellor Adolf Hitler personally gave the secret order to forcibly sterilize the Rhineland’s so-called occupation children. A special unit was set up under the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, to carry out the order. It was called Special Commission Number Three.”—DW documentary, Nazi Prejudice and Propaganda
The children were so young, some 14, and to get parental consent, the Nazis threatened mothers that their children would be sent to concentration camps.
So I revisit this gory report from history, because I need all of you to understand that the language being used, and the narrative warfare being deployed means nothing good for decent people.
When you hear racist commentary about Haitians or Somalis, understand this is part of a very real playbook being duplicated everywhere there is a democracy for grabs.
When Musk cautions UK and Irish villages that hordes are coming to rape their children, he is signaling that the Putin-Musk-Trump cabal is willing to stage horror events to make citizens believe that it’s migrants who are a threat, not the billionaire autocrats.
When Nigel Farage tells people that immigrants are eating the royal swans, recognize it as an ‘othering’ operation.
In 2024, I wrote:
JD Vance and Donald Trump are not running a campaign — they are waging war against America and Americans.
This should have ended before it even started. This flirtation with fascism should have ended the first time Trump used a racist slur to refer to immigrants.
Both these men and the party they represent are telling us what they will do if they seize power — they are telling us they plan to round up millions of people. That is genocidal language. They are targeting immigrant communities with their psychologically abusive lies — cruel lies that are directly linked to real horror events in history with monumentally tragic outcomes for millions and millions of people.
It is my duty as an independent investigative reporter to warn with my words of what has happened and what can happen again.
The Nazis never had the majority…
The advantage we have is we know their plays, we have historians who can guide us, and independent reporters who are willing to tell us the hard stories.
We’ve been letting our democracy be trampled on by real fascists, and our entire country has been blanketed with information warfare.
We need to understand that this is not politics.
It’s not politics when dehumanizing stories are used to create moral panic, when deadcatting takes the place of fact-based debate.
Personally, I would feel better if Trump, Vance, and Elon Musk were detained for questioning. I would feel better if the information warfare Putin is waging on us was thwarted and neutralized. These are dangerous men.
Take a look at Stephen Miller’s Twitter timeline, all he does is ‘othering’ — all day, all night, stoking fear about the other, dehumanizing people is his full-time job.
He is damaged and dangerous, and it’s your job to see right through him and double down on loving your neighbor, and lifting up those in your communities who are most threatened.
Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to be free, and send the Trump regime to The Hague for crimes against humanity.
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