11 August: Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White Supremacists encircle counter protestors at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching Charlottesville, Virginia. (c) NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.On 11-12 August, violent clashes erupted between the far-right Unite the Right movement and anti-fascist counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. One woman died when an alleged neo-Nazi sympathizer rammed a car into a crowd of counter-protesters. There were numerous injuries and a major national crisis erupted in the United States resulting from and inspired by the rapid rise of white nationalist, neo-Nazi and other similar sentiments far to the right of the political spectrum.
As it often happens these days, numerous people on Twitter immediately jumped in, pitching the so-called “hot takes” — rapid, hastily weaved together series of tweets with often outlandish theories of what really happened. These instant experts, who have come to prominence in the wake of the Trump presidency, have carved out a niche for themselves by taking the most tangential or non-existent connection to anything Russian and “connecting the dots” or “just asking questions”. The most egregious example is Louise Mensch, a former UK conservative pundit (and sometime MP) now residing in the US. Mensch is the most extreme example of a Twitter-age conspiracy-mongering populist. But there are other people, with more credible credentials, who are also prone to demanding that “ties with Russia” (via individuals, events and institutions) be investigated.
Immediately following the events in Charlottesville, the writer and consultant Molly McKew and Jim Ludes of the Pell Center, among others, chimed in with their “hot takes”, repeating each other almost word for word: “We need to closely examine the links between the American alt-right and Russia.” These particular expressions (“links between X and Russia”, “ties with Russia”, “Russian connections” or “close to Putin/Russian government”) are, essentially, weasel words, expressions so elastic that they could mean anything — from actively collaborating with senior Russian officials and secretly accepting large donations from to the vaguest, irrelevant connections mentioned simply for the sake of name-dropping Russia in an attempt to farm for more clicks.
