When Bezmenov in the 1970s and 80s warned us that the Soviet Union was trying to undermine America by planting the seeds of discontent, only a few paid much attention. Now we should have known that. America is divided and on the brink of a civil war. The warnings of people acting in Russia’s interest are there. And not just through people, like Trump and members of Project 2025. The mouthpiece seems to come from other countries, whose groups are louder than most MAGA. And Tony Pentimalli explains the dangers behind this and sends a clear cut warning to Europe to beware of this hidden propaganda.
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Pull back the curtain and the illusion collapses. For years, MAGA sold the image of a swelling grassroots army of patriotic Americans fighting to take their country back, a movement powered by truckers in Ohio, retirees in Florida, and factory workers in Pennsylvania. But the moment X rolled out its new account location transparency feature, the truth snapped into focus. Behind the flags and Bible verses and eagle emojis were not millions of everyday Americans. They were operators sitting in Nigeria, Eastern Europe, India, Thailand, and other places, running some of the loudest MAGA accounts in existence. The mask did not slip. It fell.
The exposure was immediate and startling. A massive MAGA aggregation account with nearly four hundred thousand followers was traced to Eastern Europe. An Ivanka Trump fan account with more than a million followers was revealed to be based in Nigeria. Dozens of other prominent accounts that had long styled themselves as ordinary American voices suddenly appeared as foreign-based the instant the feature went live. While no verified total exists that captures every such account or their combined follower reach, public reporting confirmed that the scale was meaningful and far from fringe. A nontrivial portion of MAGA’s digital influence originates outside the United States.
Make no mistake, this is not incidental. Donald Trump has repeatedly amplified foreign-based MAGA accounts through retweets and direct engagement, integrating their content into the core bloodstream of his political influence. He benefits from their volume, their outrage, and their spectacle. That means foreign-origin content is not simply tolerated. It is actively rewarded.
The platform itself bears direct responsibility not for revealing the problem, but for building the system that allowed it to thrive uninterrupted for years. Under Elon Musk’s leadership, X had long rewarded anonymous political amplification with reach, revenue, and legitimacy without meaningful verification or labeling. The later rollout of the “About This Account” location feature merely converted hidden architecture into visible evidence. Even after that exposure, enforcement remained minimal, monetization continued, and no serious corrective framework followed. The platform acknowledged technical imperfections such as IP and VPN distortions, but it did not dismantle the revenue engine that made foreign political impersonation profitable. Transparency arrived without consequence, and that failure of consequence is where institutional responsibility now squarely rests.
Foreign operators thrive in this ecosystem because MAGA is engineered for exploitation. A movement built on grievance, fear, and permanent outrage is a magnet for opportunists. A community trained to distrust institutions while worshiping anonymous avatars is easy prey. A political leader who rewards flattery with amplification creates instant power for anyone who feeds his narrative. The pipeline is straightforward and dangerous. Content created overseas moves instantly into American political life with presidential validation.
This is how authoritarian ecosystems evolve. They do not rely on citizenship or truth or shared civic obligation. They rely on spectacle, on repetition, on the frictionless spread of emotional manipulation. The fact that foreign operators can shape MAGA discourse so easily is not a testament to foreign sophistication. It is proof of domestic vulnerability. A movement built on illusion will always be governed by whoever learns to pull the levers fastest.
History is unambiguous on this point. Democracies decay not only from invasion but from corrosion. Propaganda has always crossed borders. What distinguishes a healthy democracy is its resistance to it. Today, that resistance is failing. A former president benefits from foreign amplification. A right-wing media ecosystem refuses to acknowledge the exposure. A dominant social platform financially incentivizes extremism. The result is not just infiltration. It is the slow erosion of civic reality itself.
The emotional cost is no longer abstract. When Americans argue with MAGA accounts, many are no longer arguing with other Americans. When families cite viral posts to justify distrust of elections, contempt for immigrants, or hostility toward democratic institutions, those scripts may originate thousands of miles away. When election workers are harassed, journalists threatened, and judges targeted, the rhetorical fuel often traces back to unverified digital sources that Americans assume are domestic voices. A democracy fractures when its citizens unknowingly outsource their political imagination to people who do not live within the system they are destabilizing.
What this has done to the American interior is incalculable. It has broken living rooms and Thanksgiving tables. It has turned parents and children into strangers, siblings into ideological enemies, lifelong friends into social casualties. Millions of Americans now live inside parallel realities that no longer intersect. Trust in elections, in medicine, in journalism, in neighbors has been poisoned at scale. The country has not merely been polarized. It has been psychologically reshaped. A decade of algorithmic distortion, foreign amplification, and cynical political exploitation has rewired how Americans perceive truth, authority, and one another. This was not just influence. It was mass manipulation, and we are only beginning to take stock of the damage.
The institutional stakes are even higher. A nation cannot sustain democratic legitimacy when its political identity can be impersonated at scale by external profiteers. Accountability collapses when influence is detached from citizenship. Authentic participation becomes indistinguishable from counterfeit activism. The boundary between political voice and foreign masquerade dissolves.
This moment demands more than recognition. It demands action. Americans must insist on real transparency about who is shaping political discourse online. Platforms must be forced to clearly disclose foreign operation of political accounts in political spaces. Revenue sharing systems that reward foreign political manipulation must be audited and restrained. Federal institutions must treat foreign-run political influence not as a social media novelty but as a national security risk.
We can no longer reduce this to a culture war or a partisan feud. This is a sovereignty crisis. It is a truth crisis. It is a vulnerability crisis. A foreign machine is helping write America’s political script, and too many remain captivated by the performance without ever demanding to see who is operating the controls. The curtain has already been pulled back. What remains is the harder decision of whether Americans are willing to act on what they can now plainly see.
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