The Russians Did It !

While it is dismantled in the United States, the censorship industrial complex is thriving in France and across Europe.

Tristan Waleckx, Complément d’Enquête’s anchor, claiming on X that “astounding revelations” show that France is being targeted by massive Russian desinfo ops to sway the 2027 presidential election.

The mainstream media claims that Russian digital battle tanks have rolled into Paris! Their guns are trained on Notre Dame and Brigitte Macron, to sway the 2027 French presidential election. This echoes the narratives we heard during the 2024 European elections and the Paris Olympics, a pattern that seems to repeat before every major electoral or cultural/sport event. Bis repetita placent¹.

Influence has long been a tool for states and other actors to further their agendas. When done covertly, it’s called subversion.

A large part of the French press between the two world wars was funded by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, when it wasn’t outright owned and thus serving major vested interests like the Comité des Forges or the Insurers’ Association. The Comintern, more than Edward Bernays, systematized modern influence and subversion tactics, building on 19th-century methods developed to suppress worker revolts.

The digital age and social media have shattered the financial barriers to information production. As economist Alfred Sauvy quipped in the 1970s, “press freedom exists—if you have the billions to afford it.” Today, that’s history: with an internet connection and a device, anyone can create and distribute information on social platforms, reaching vast audiences.

All serious studies available show that fake news factories and troll farms have little to no impact on public opinion. This was e.g. demonstrated by the very official and reputable National Bureau of Economic Research in 2021.

So why does the western elite remain fixated on online disinformation despite its minimal effect? The answer may lie in its definitive disconnect from reality. This elite is made up of people convinced that the model is reality, whereas a model is only a possible, highly imperfect, and biased representation of reality. They confuse the map for the territory, a hallmark of managerial delusion. Reality, with its complexity, uncertainty, and friction, terrifies them. They prefer the tidy comfort of their Excel spreadsheets, where they dictate causal links and label them as truth. But truth isn’t proclaimed; it emerges through a contentious, time-consuming social process.

“This united front of public and private organizational power is the real deep state. And it is why we quickly began to see intelligence services working so closely with activist NGOs like CCDH, or with putatively private firms like Graphika, a for-profit “social network analysis” company that was initially funded by the U.S. Defense Department to fight terrorist propaganda but then redeployed to identify and censor public discourse about COVID-19 and other concerns” writes N.S. Lyons.

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The French public broadcasting system, costing taxpayers 4 billion euros annually, is at it again, amplifying the Russian disinformation narrative with the latest “Complément d’enquête”² episode.

“This robust program, crafted by Julie Benzoni and Valentine Watrin,” boldly claims Télérama, a weekly magazine under the Le Monde group, controlled by oligarchs Xavier Niel³ and Daniel Kretinsky⁴, and subsidized with close to 8 million euros in public money each year. Télérama has the audacity to feature a pop-up on its website, urging subscriptions to “support independent journalism” . Try not to laugh.

The judicial coup performed through the provisional sentencing of Marine Le Pen, isn’t deemed sufficient…

Judicial Fair

At the same time, Yannick Neuder, the French minister of health, is once more raising the alarm over health disinformation and declaring war. To whom exactly? Neither the state nor medical doctors can claim ownership over the bodies and minds of French citizens. Science demands open debate, not diktats from ministers, bureaucrats, or co-opted medical committees. The era of the therapeutic state, as Christopher Lasch⁵ termed it, is long gone.

French health minister declaring war on desinfo by setting-up a “National obervatory of health desinformation”

Unless this is simply a Pavlovian reaction to the White House’s recent launch of its “True Origins of Covid” website.We previously highlighted the discomfort in Paris surrounding the hypothesis of a laboratory leak.

[ Analysis ] The Origins of Covid: True Lies

Disinformation has become the tool for those in the elite, whose careers were forged through corruption—understood literally, as a process of rot—and who have led the nation into decline, to wage a war on the populace with an intensity rivaling that of the Inquisition, acting for the Catholic Church besieged by the Reformation. After being consistently wrong and deceptive, they cling to “science,” now twisted into a Manichean dogma, as their last resort to naively sustain their grip on power and dominance.

Sorry for the tangent. Back to our Russian scapegoats.

The latest Complément d’enquête episode marks another blatant, taxpayer-funded attempt at social engineering . With the presidential election two years away, it sets the stage for a campaign to vilify populist movements, which are gaining such traction that the center, trapped between leftist and far-right pressures, has resorted to enlisting corporations to surveil them. Yes, Emmanuel Macron has contracted private intelligence firms to monitor libertarians...