On November 13, The Atlantic published a series of Twitter direct messages between Wikileaks’ official account and Donald Trump Jr. First recorded contact was September 20, 2016.

Trump-Russia watchers pounced. Wikileaks disseminated documents Russian hackers stole from the DNC and Clinton campaign officials. Now there’s proof the Trump campaign communicated with Wikileaks starting almost two months before the election. It’s not a smoking gun, but it busts another lie and adds to the growing pile of evidence indicating a relationship with the Russian government.

However, lost in the hullabaloo over “did Trump work with Wikileaks?” was an interesting question:

“Why did Wikileaks want to help Trump?”

A Non-State Hostile Intelligence Service

Don Jr.’s DMs contain little damning information. There’s no mention of stolen emails or other private documents, nor discussion of their release. The most incriminating things are Wikileaks telling Don Jr. they guessed the password to an anti-Trump website — Junior said he’d ask around, but there’s no indication he did anything — and Wikileaks drawing Junior’s attention to its release of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s personal emails. 15 minutes after Junior got the message, Trump tweeted about it.

However, there’s an important difference between drawing attention to publicly-available information and sharing private information. Don Jr.’s correspondence with Wikileaks does not include the latter. It appears more like an unconventional version of normal campaign-media interaction. Media organization pushes something it published, campaign likes it and helps it spread.

Junior tweeted out a link from Wikileaks two days later, but never responded to another message.

Wikileaks, however, kept writing. They asked Don Jr. to leak one or more of his father’s tax returns, arguing that they could come out at any time and Wikileaks would treat Trump more fairly than MSNBC. Additionally:

If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality. That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a “pro-Trump”“pro-Russia” source.

There’s little doubt Wikileaks wanted Donald Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Post-election messages to Don Jr. suggest a personal motive. Assange has lived in Ecuador’s embassy in London since August 2012, hiding from extradition to Sweden, where he’s been accused of rape. After Trump won, Wikileaks contacted Don Jr., pleading Assange’s case and asking Trump to suggest that Assange’s native country of Australia make him ambassador to the U.S.

But Wikileaks’ core motivation was probably political. Assange has long hated Hillary Clinton, both as a person and as a personification of the American/Western/global establishment. Looking at the United States’ choices in 2016, there’s no question Assange and his organization saw Hillary as the greater evil.

Anti-Trumpers say that’s because Wikileaks works for Russia. But I don’t think that’s accurate. Wikileaks disseminated documents stolen from the DNC and Podesta, which helped Russia’s efforts to influence the election, but that appears more cooperation based on mutual interests than orders from on high.

As CIA Director Mike Pompeo put it:

It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.

Wikileaks aims to publicize America’s classified information, and its primary, almost exclusive target in 2015 and 2016 was an American presidential candidate. However, the available evidence indicates “abetted by Russia” is more accurate than “working for.”

Wikileaks-Russia

In the summer of 2016, when Wikileaks was leaking Democratic emails, it declined a large cache of data from Russia’s Interior Ministry. Parts of the cache leaked in 2014, revealing Russian military and intelligence activity in Ukraine. However, more than half remained unpublished. As the source of the documents told Foreign Policy:

We had several leaks sent to Wikileaks, including the Russian hack. It would have exposed Russian activities and shown Wikileaks was not controlled by Russian security services. Many Wikileaks staff and volunteers or their families suffered at the hands of Russian corruption and cruelty, we were sure Wikileaks would release it. Assange gave excuse after excuse.

This reveals a significant change since the organization’s founding in 2006. Wikileaks exposed the United States more than other countries — revealing American activity in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the global War on Terrorism — but in its first five years released information from Russia, Kenya, Peru, the Church of Scientology, private security companies, and others.

However, in the 2010s Assange became increasingly pro-Russian. In 2012, he had a show on Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin-funded international media network. He criticized reporting on the Panama Papers leak — which revealed extensive international money laundering and political corruption — arguing the publishers cherry-picked information that made Russia look bad. And he faced accusations of suppressing a leak proving Russian state banks were funding the Syrian government three years before Russia intervened in that country.

Someone assuming Russia’s behind everything might see this as evidence Assange has been compromised — or always worked for Russia but used to hide it better. A more likely explanation is a myopic focus on “the establishment” as the enemy, leading him to make common cause with anyone who opposes it.

The Libertarian-Authoritarian Alliance

Wikileaks’ libertarian, almost anarchic anti-establishment worldview — basically, a few governments and large corporations run the world, and revealing what they don’t want you to know enhances individual freedom — is popular among some overlapping online subcultures I’m grouping under the term “internet radicals.”

There are right- and left-wing variations — mostly blame governments and international institutions? Or corporations and billionaires? — but in general, internet radicals believe:

1. They’re enlightened. Others are blind, duped, or in on it.

2. The media suppresses the truth in service to an establishment-perpetuating narrative.

3. The establishment oppresses internet radicals, denying them free speech, lest they enlighten others. (Matrix red pill/blue pill analogies are common).

“The establishment” is conceptually clear but categorically nebulous. Exactly who counts as establishment depends on who you ask. However, most internet radicals believe at least some of the following are part of the problem:

The United States (especially the military and intelligence services), the European Union, major political parties, corporations and wealthy individuals (various), neoliberalism, neoconservativism, political correctness, social justice warriors, and, of course, the media.

More generally, internet radicalism stands in opposition to the liberal democratic West. This focus leads to strange bedfellows.

Vladimir Putin is not an internet radical. But he aims to weaken NATO and the EU, and undermine faith in Western democracy.

To advance this goal, Russia supports anti-establishment political parties and causes throughout the West. Many are right-wing — National Front in France, Freedom Party in Austria, Jobbik in Hungary, Northern League in Italy — but some are left-wing, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. To Russia, the details don’t matter as long as the parties denounce and disrupt the system.

Most infamously, Russia engages in “active measures” in the United States and Europe, with intelligence operatives stealing information and an army of trolls deploying to social media and comment boards, stoking political division and public distrust, sometimes aided by bots or paid advertisements.

Internet radicals and the Russian government often pursue the same goals — usually without direct coordination — amplifying each other’s voice online. This despite the fact that Russia suppresses free speech more egregiously than the U.S. or Europe.

Russia Today

The fight against Western media leads some internet radicals to support Russian government propaganda.

In September, the U.S. Justice Department announced it would require RT to register as a foreign agent. Under the Foreign Agent Registration Act — an anti-propaganda law passed in 1938 — RT videos and articles will have to disclose that they’re funded by the Russian government.

On Medium, Caitlin Johnstone objects to DoJ’s decision, because RT gave a show to an anti-establishment comedian named Lee Camp. Camp couldn’t get a show elsewhere, which he says is because the “unvarnished truth… about the corporate state we live in” is “not allowed on all of the other channels.” For Johnstone, this is both self-evidently true and a good reason to apologize for Russia Today:

By deliberately de-platforming leftist and other anti-establishment voices on all their outlets, corporate media networks create an impenetrable blockade for dissenting individuals pursuing their innate human right to speak and be heard, leaving them with no other choice but to go on RT America. All this hysteria around RT has been establishment power bitching about an outlet stepping in to fill a vacuum that establishment power itself created.

It’s possible media executives conspired to blacklist Lee Camp. It’s also possible his appeal is — putting it generously — limited. (If you’re curious, watch his act).

Camp’s a comedian who didn’t make it big. It’s understandable he said yes when RT offered him a platform. But the only reason RT gives Camp, or anyone else, a platform is because it advances the Russia government’s agenda.

There’s no reason to believe Camp is a Russian agent. But he helps Russia’s information warfare strategy. By amplifying as many divisive, niche voices as possible — no matter their message — Russia aims to heighten political conflict and undermine public faith in democratic institutions.

RT is using Camp, and Camp’s letting himself be used. But because this might do a tiny bit of damage to the Western establishment — which “represses” dissenters by not giving them their own show — Johnstone defends a government that jails and kills journalists and political opponents.

RT apologists are common among internet radicals. For another example, here’s The Young Turks’ Michael Tracey:

He’s kidding, of course. But only about the number. Based on Tracey’s writing, it’s clear he thinks The New York Times and other bastions of American media are no better — and may be worse — than RT. The establishment is the ultimate enemy, which puts Tracey on the side of anyone fighting it.

However, Friedman’s column — which I didn’t like either — is an opinion piece in an open, cacophonous public discussion. That’s categorically different from state-run media dedicated to advancing national interests by coordinating television, writing, and a large social media network, propped up by bots, to stoke divisions in foreign countries.

Internet radicals are so convinced American media companies work in concert to craft a deliberately manipulative narrative on behalf of shadowy moneyed interests that they’re defending RT, a network that’s actually crafting a deliberately manipulative narrative on behalf of shadowy moneyed interests.

Are Internet Radicals Against Democracy?

In his 2016 book Against Democracy, Georgetown philosophy professor Jason Brennan argues for “rule of the knowledgeable.” Brennan’s main target is uninformed voters, but his logic fits internet radicals’ conception of a duped “blue pill” citizenry.

After all, who’s to say what’s knowledgeable? For an informed voter, knowledgeable means awareness of the facts and major arguments. For an internet radical, knowledgeable means skepticism regarding what the establishment says are facts, and rejection of the major arguments as artificial disagreement designed to obfuscate challenges to the establishment narrative.

This worldview presupposes that if we vanquish the grand conspiracy, a better world will flower in its place.

But that almost never happens. Break the system and some powerful people suffer, but the powerless suffer more. And the vanquished elites get replaced by other elites, who are often worse.

If there’s an international power vacuum, someone will fill it. The alternative to the capitalist liberal democracy championed by the West isn’t a decentralized utopia where individual freedom flourishes. It’s the centralized authoritarianism of Russia or China.

Failing to realize this was Edward Snowden’s big mistake. He revealed U.S. government spying on Americans, which was arguably whistleblowing, and revealed American intelligence practices to Russia and China, which was definitely not. Helping authoritarian powers gain at the expense of the United States does not make the world freer.

Assange, Snowden, Camp, Johnstone, Tracey, and other internet radicals are so fixated on fighting the Western establishment they don’t realize or don’t care that they’re helping empower something worse.

Political correctness can be annoying. Mainstream media coverage can be frustrating. But authoritarians censor public discourse, and arrest or kill journalists and political dissidents. When internet radicals freely express themselves online, they exhibit the openness of the system they criticize.

Liberal democracy has numerous flaws. But it’s the least bad option because it balances competing interests, protects individual rights, and can course correct — not perfectly, but better than alternative political-economic systems.

However, internet radicals believe the Western establishment is so awful that whoever opposes it must be better. That myopia explains why people who denounce corporate media defend state propaganda. And how pranksters and free speech absolutists from Reddit and 4Chan turned into information warfare shock troops for authoritarian leaders, both aspiring and real.

Net Neutrality

A microcosm of internet radicals’ fundamental error can be seen in the fight over net neutrality.

Trump’s FCC chair Ajit Pai introduced a plan to remove rules that prohibit internet service providers (ISPs), such as Verizon and Comcast, from varying download speed based on content. If it passes as expected on December 14th, ISPs can charge internet companies for faster data transmission.

The danger is that ISPs might quickly transmit partners’ data while slowing down competitors. One company works with Amazon to slow down Netflix and another does the opposite. Another promotes Bing by charging for Google.

Even more problematic: Some ISPs have local monopolies, giving customers little choice. If “to get full internet, you must bundle with cable and a landline” sounds good to you, you’ll love the new environment.

This is concerning for startups. Facebook and other giants will secure long-term deals, but new sites will start out in the slow lane. That creates a barrier to entry, potentially stifling the common internet business model of making a website/app and seeing if it catches on.

And it’s especially concerning for media and public communication. Without net neutrality, ISPs could decide to slow down — or even block — a website because they don’t like what it’s saying. Here’s an example of a problematic scenario:

Assange is right. And it’s a smart way to make the case — appealing directly to Trump’s personal interest.

But it leads to an obvious question: why help Trump win in the first place?

Some internet radicals like Trump. Some don’t, but think his election validates their anti-establishment worldview. However, though they often disagree, almost all internet radicals support net neutrality. And they all despise Hillary Clinton.

Clinton, it turns out, ran to continue the policies of the administration that installed net neutrality protections.

Sometimes, the enemy of your enemy is not your friend.