I was born into a nation of conspiracy-mongers. For all their many admirable qualities, Iranians have a penchant for explaining the world through conspiracy theories, a talent for discovering a hidden hand — usually a Jewish or American one — behind every national setback and personal mishap.
Now I’m afraid that the West has succumbed to the same fever.
Only in the West these days, the hidden hand is usually a Russian one. And unlike in the Muslim world, where it’s typically the man on the street who suspects elites of serving nefarious foreigners, in the West, it’s the reverse: Many elites imagine that the common people, vast swaths of their own populations, are Kremlin agents.
The latest symptom of this elite mania appeared in France, where authorities blame Russian cyber operations for the mass protests that have erupted across the country. “There has been some suspect activity,” a French official told the Wall Street Journal. “We are in the process of looking at the impact.”
Paris is probing “any Kremlin role in social-media activity that has amplified” the uprising “and spread misinformation about it,” per the Journal. This, even though Facebook says it hasn’t found any evidence, and a researcher with the Atlantic Council similarly denied seeing foreign interference.
It doesn’t take a political science genius to uncover the origins of the yellow vest movement. French President Emmanuel Macron invited the backlash with a fuel tax that would have penalized rural and working-class people for their lifestyles. They rose up and were soon joined by others dissatisfied with Macron’s high-handed liberalism.
No matter: If it’s a challenge to liberalism, it must be the Russians’ doing.
Across the Atlantic, there is the Russian “collusion” narrative that has gripped Democrats ever since Election Day 2016. President Trump didn’t help with some of his gross rhetoric and refusal to criticize Vladimir Putin. But as a matter of policy, he has proved far tougher on Moscow than President Barack Obama. Trump has armed Ukraine, bombed Russian operatives in Syria and squeezed Putin’s clients in Tehran, among other things.
Yes, Russian operatives flooded social media with misleading (and often comically amateurish) posts, as a Senate Intelligence Committee report this week reaffirmed. But it takes a deeply cynical view of voters in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to think they cast their ballots for Trump because of online memes — rather than, say, because he spoke to their anxieties over immigration and working-class jobs and wages.
Ditto for Britons who in 2016 voted to leave the European Union, an outcome many Remainers attribute to Kremlin meddling.
Russian trolling even gets blamed when movie franchises disappoint their fans. In October, a University of Southern California researcher claimed that online trolls had spread and amplified political criticism of last year’s “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” with its cringey PC themes. The aim was to propagate “discord and dysfunction in American society,” which “remains a strategic goal for . . . the Russian Federation.”
This style of conspiracism allows political and cultural elites to shift blame for mass dissatisfaction with liberalism to someone else. In this sense, it’s not unlike the Persian variety, which would sooner blame national failures on wily Zionists and Yanks than look closer to home.
Don’t get me wrong: Russia is a serious adversary of the US and democratic West. Putin seeks to dominate the small and unfortunate states that live under Russia’s shadow. He wants to displace America as the leading outside power in the Middle East. And he wants to downgrade American prestige. No doubt sowing social division inside Europe and the US is part of the plan.
But liberals would do better to listen to the angry cries of voters and left-behinds rather than pretending that they act under Moscow’s spell — or worse, treating them as pathological bigots whose online speech needs to be closely monitored and curtailed, lest it spread the pro-Russian germ to others. That elite attitude is far more likely to widen social divisions than any meme produced in a troll farm on the outskirts of St. Petersburg.
Sohrab Ahmari is op-ed editor of The Post and author of the forthcoming memoir of Catholic conversion, “From Fire, by Water.”