After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes

Years later, just before I left Washington, I had coffee with a journalist who had spent a lot of time looking at Russia’s use of disinformation. I described how it had taken years for me to understand the psychological toll that came from a daily bombardment of messages on social media that dehumanized and threatened me. How it was impossible to know what was someone’s real voice and what was automated, what was American and what was Russian. “That’s part of the point, right?” he said. “To demoralize the opponent.” As obvious as that was, it had never occurred to me in quite that way before—that my mental state was one tiny front in a war that Putin had been waging since Beslan, that he had projected back onto America what he found ugly about us and in turn shaped us into something that bore a closer resemblance to his view of the world, a place in which truth and individual human beings are incidental to the raw will to power.