Congress Claims Russia Behind Anti-Fracking Sentiment

By Brandon Turbeville, Natural Blaze

Fresh on the heels of a report issued by Iowa State University researchers and repeated ad nauseum by mainstream corporate media, the U.S. Congress has issued its own report blaming the Russians for yet another destabilizing movement in the U.S. – opposition to fracking and pipeline projects. That’s right, if you think fracking is toxic and dangerous, you have fallen prey to Russian propaganda. If you think using eminent domain to take the homes of American citizens for the benefit of energy companies is wrong, again, you are simply repeating Russian propaganda. If you are worried that your tap water may be flammable, Russians!!

The new Congressional report entitled, “Russian Attempts To Influence Domestic Energy Markets By Exploiting Social Media,” written by the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in the House of Representatives, thus demonstrates that the United States has descended to a level of neo-McCarthyism only paralleled by the 1950s.

The Congressional Committee report engages in a twenty-one page conspiracy theory packed with enough evidence to fit on the head of a pin. Much like the rest of the Russian meddling conspiracy theories pushed by mainstream media and the U.S. government, there isn’t a shred of credible evidence to back up the claims that the Russian government engaged in a campaign of meddling or destabilization of the United States, its elections, or anything else.

The entire narrative was invented during the course of the 2016 election by Deep State operatives and the Democratic party in order to paint Hillary Clinton’s fortunate loss as an act of aggression by a foreign state and to block any real attempt on the part of the Trump administration at rapprochement with Russia. The mouthpiece of that Deep State, the mainstream media, has thus hammered the propaganda into the minds of the American people.

The majority of the evidence the Committee uses to prove its case against Russia is the fact that Russian state funded outlet, RT reported on the documented dangers of fracking. Indeed, the RT report, an extremely small number of alleged Russian bots reposting anti-fracking information, and other Congressional reports no doubt citing other congressional reports with the same amount of information listed in the original congressional report is the extent of the US Congress’ evidence.

In a section laughably called “Fracking Threatens The Kremlin’s Agenda,” the report states, “The substantial increase in domestic production has resulted in an abundant supply of American energy, which is increasingly making its way into the global marketplace. While this stands to provide substantial economic benefits to the U.S., it simultaneously represents a direct threat to Russian energy interests.”

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So, Russia has launched a coordinated campaign to paint fracking as dangerous and toxic to protect its own natural gas interests according to the congressional report. In addition, Russia attempted to stoke racial tensions and environmental concerns as part of the campaign the report alleges. So, Congress is also chalking the anti-Dakota Pipeline and Black Lives Matter movements were the fault of Russia, not Keystone and George Soros.

It is also important to note that both Hillary Clinton and Anders Fogh Ragmussen have been pushing the “Russia is against fracking” narrative since at least 2014. As the report states,

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then-Secretary General of NATO, told reporters in 2014, “Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas.”

Former Secretary of State and then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, with access to intelligence reports, made a private speech in 2014, according to documents from WikiLeaks, which included statements about the struggles of dealing with Russian-backed environmental groups. According to a media report, Secretary Clinton said the following: “We [the State Department and the U.S.] were up against Russia pushing oligarchs and others to buy media. We were even up against phony environmental groups, and I’m a big environmentalist, but these were funded by the Russians to stand against any effort, ‘Oh that pipeline, that fracking, that whatever will be a problem for you,’ and a lot of the money supporting that message was coming from Russia.”

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The report continues by stating,

In January 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report that contained “clear evidence that the Kremlin is financing and choreographing anti-fracking propaganda in the United States.”25 The report found that the Russian-sponsored news agency RT (formerly Russian Today) “r[an] anti-fracking programing, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health,” which “is likely reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and the U.S. natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to [Russian energy companies’] profitability,” such as state-controlled Russian energy giant Gazprom.

The DNI office claims have already been debunked a thousand times over thus leaving us with the “evidence” that a news organization ran stories about the realities of fracking while the American media essentially promoted the literal company line. While RT may “likely” have been reflective of concerns of the Russian government, the Western media’s reporting of the issue was undoubtedly reflective of the concerns of the American government and its corporate patrons. Of course, simply reporting on the dangers of fracking does not equal Russian meddling. It simply means that RT, operated by a foreign government, somehow managed to give Americans a freer press than the media in their own country.

Some of the biggest fear-mongering centers around the IRA (Internet Research Agency), an alleged Russian troll farm. As The Washington Post writes,

The 21-page report drew from documents submitted in the fall by Twitter and Facebook, which owns Instagram, for congressional investigations into the social media influence campaign during the 2016 presidential election. Those probes focused on the efforts by the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in St. Petersburg that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III indicted in February for disrupting and influencing U.S. politics.

The committee’s report found that between 2015 and 2017, more than 9,000 posts and tweets dealt with U.S. energy policy produced by 4,334 Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts controlled by the Internet Research Agency. Twitter told the committee that more than 4 percent of tweets produced by the Russians dealt with energy and climate issues.

9,000 posts and tweets caused this much damage and produced this much influence in the American political sphere? Activists across the political spectrum can now rejoice. If 9,000 social media posts made over two years can produce such powerful results, little activist organizations have much greater influence than they ever thought before. Indeed, since 4% of 9,000 is 360, it apparently only takes a few hundred social media posts to disrupt U.S. energy markets and install a president much more to our liking. Time to get to work everyone. We only need 9,000 posts on social media and then we can finally sit back and relax.

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Of course, it should also be noted that many of the individual members of Congress promoting this report as “evidence” of Russian meddling are connected heavily to the energy markets themselves, particularly the fracking industry.

At the end of the day, however, this report is just one more in a long line of propaganda pieces being pushed by a hidden Deep State apparatus and repeated by the corporate mainstream media in order to intimidate anti-fracking activists into silence out of fear of being labeled a Russian agent as well as to convince the vast majority of Americans that any criticism of American energy policy is a Russian agent. It is for this reason that individuals who oppose fracking must begin to speak out even louder before the “anti-Russian” sleuths have their way and dissent is simply impossible.