After 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Russia the United States' "No. 1 foe" during a CNN interview, he was subjected to mockery for the duration of the campaign.
During one debate with President Barack Obama, the incumbent even jabbed Romney over the remark, suggesting it showed he was out of touch with current events. "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back," Obama chided.
Fast forward to the present, and few reasonable people would dispute Russia's threat to U.S. democracy and global stability. However, it's not in the form of global atomic annihilation, despite reports last week that Russia has developed a so-called "space nuke."
Instead, experts argue the greatest threat Russia poses to the U.S. is as a sower of discord. Putin's government and its allies operate "troll farms" spreading disinformation to the American electorate, helping push what once were fringe conspiracy theories and ideologies into mainstream politics.
"If our enemies are flooding social media with all of this stuff which is not just inaccurate but harmful to democracy, then you get people, like the far-right, who are now pro-Putin. They don't care about the Khashoggi murder, and now they think authoritarianism is good," said Carolyn Gallaher, a professor at American University's School of International Service who studies far-right extremism and Russian election interference.
"American democracy is at stake," she added.
Now, as Russia prepares to pit Americans against one another amid a new election cycle, it's taken an interest in Texas politics, specifically, the push by some for Texas to secede from the rest of the United States. Indeed, the once-fringe secessionist movement has broken into mainstream news cycle like the Kool-Aid Man through a brick wall. Hell, the question of whether Texas could become a breakaway republic even graced a recent Newsweek cover.
Although the Texas Nationalist Movement, or TEXIT, is real and made up of flesh-and-blood Texans, some of its most avid online supporters appear to be Russian trolls. What's more, experts including Gallaher warn that those trolls are more concerned with weakening the United States' status as a global superpower than seeing the success of a Second Republic of Texas.
North American Fella Organization
A U.S. Army veteran who uses the handle @FluteMagician on social media platform X was among the first to recognize irregularities in the accounts of the most vocal TEXIT supporters. Last month, he pieced together that "TEXIT" was a keyword search frequently used by accounts suspected of spreading Russian propaganda.
The veteran, who asked the Current not to use his real name out of fear of retribution from far-right extremists, didn't work in intelligence during his time in the military. Even so, he said he was trained to detect behaviors that appear random but are actually coordinated.
He's also a member of the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO), an organized social media group dedicated to countering Russian propaganda and disinformation, especially related to that country's invasion of Ukraine.
"What I discovered is Russian trolls operate using keyword searches based on their specific mission or current events that Russians want to give attention to," he explained. "I found that 'TEXIT' was one of the keyword searches, and I just worked backward through the trolls to find out who they were connected to."
The accounts the online NAFO sleuth targeted had odd syntax in their messages, which frequently voiced support for TEXIT while also making out-of-place comments about the greatness of Russia. One such X account he suspects of being of Russian origin is @TexanIndSup, or Texas Independence Supporters.
In one tweet defending itself against being a Russian operative posing as a TEXIT supporter, @TexasIndSup wrote, "How does Russia have any connection to Texas independence when Texas isn't even seen as an important thing to Russia? Russia is also not the aggressors in the Ukrainian-Russian War."
In another tweet from the account, @TexasIndSup encouraged the U.S. media to stop covering the Russia-Ukraine conflict and instead focus on issues "within its homeland." Another tweet from the account railed against the Democrats' "Pro Women Rights" platform.
"We will never support the whole 'Pro Women Rights' thing because 'Pro Women's Rights' is just code for 'Pro-abortion," the account stated.
The account @TexasIndSup didn't respond to the Current's inquiry about its country of origin.
The NAFO member's investigation of the @TexasIndSup account is one of dozens of examples of alleged Russian bots interacting with and supporting fringe right-wing movements he's chronicled on his X profile.
Privyet, fellow Texans
Such online investigations might be easy to dismiss as conspiracy theories of their own had the Russian government not shown a prior interest in Texas politics — and specifically the idea of secession.
A U.S. Senate report on Russian interference during the 2016 presidential campaign found Russian bots actively promoting TEXIT, along with an array of right-wing conspiracy theories. Since then, some of the same conspiracies have become mainstream talking points of the Republican Party.
The 2018 Senate report zeroed in on a public Facebook page called "Heart of Texas" and the Instagram account @rebeltexas. Both were created and managed by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company researchers described as a troll farm.
"You just have these people sitting in a building, they speak English, and they are reading and monitoring what's going on in English-speaking social media in the United States, and they are creating these narratives and flooding platforms with shit," American University's Gallaher said.
The shit flooding the Heart of Texas Facebook page — which picked up hundreds of thousands of users during the 2016 election cycle — included "visual clusters included with a wide swatch of shapes of Texas, landscape photos of flowers and memes about secession and refugees," according to the Senate report.
In May 2016, the operators of the Facebook page upped the ante in its effort to spread potential unrest, according to the Senate report. Using the platform, they organized a rally outside a mosque in Houston to "Stop the Islamification of Texas." Not only did the Russians behind the Heart of Texas page organize an Islamophobic protest, but another Russian-sponsored group, the United Muslims of America, helped create a counter-protest, the report notes.
In other words, both sides of a protest at a Texas mosque in 2016 were brought there, at least in part, thanks to the work of the Russian government, according to investigators.
During that same election cycle, the Russian-backed @rebeltexas Instagram account shared posts calling for an insurrection against the federal government, according to the Senate report. What's more, @rebeltexas parroted TEXIT talking points and drew similarities between the Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) and Brexit. That account also tried to organize an in-person TEXIT rally, which ultimately ended up being unsuccessful, according to the federal report.
More recently, TNM President Daniel Miller also likened his group's push to break Texas off from the United States to Brexit. However, in a recent conversation with the Current, he said his organization isn't funded or supported by the Russian government.
Mr. Miller goes to Moscow
Just the same, Miller acknowledged that his group isn't without past ties to the Kremlin. Representatives from the TNM attended two separate political conferences in Russia in 2015 and 2016, Miller said.
The Dialogue of Nations conferences attended by TNM officials were billed as safe spaces where separatist groups from around the world — Irish republican party Sinn Féin and the Catalonian Independence Party among them — could speak about their movements and learn from colleagues abroad.
The conferences were funded by a state grant from Russia's National Charity Fund, founded in 1999 by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and fueled by donations from state-owned public companies and oligarchs, British-based newspaper The Guardian reports.
Miller said TNM gave a presentation at one of the conferences about Article 1 Section 2 of the Texas Constitution — his group's argument for legal secession. The conference paid for his group's lodging and food but nothing more, he added.
"That literally is the sum total of what was paid [by the conference], and people go around, and they spread this nonsense that somehow we got this grant money and all this kind of nonsense," Miller said. "They covered our food and they covered a hotel. That's it, just like any other speaking engagement or any other conference."
Miller adamantly maintains that following the 2016 conference in Moscow, he and his group have cut off contact with the Russian organizers and haven't spoken with them since.
Despite Miller's insistence that TNM has ended its contact, Russian politicians have made no secret that they wholeheartedly support the movement.
In 2019, now-defunct progressive news site ThinkProgress reported that TNM's flag hung in the office of Alexander Ionov, a prominent Russian businessman and a leader of that country's Anti-Globalization Movement. This month, former Russian president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, vocalized his support for Texas secession.
"Establishing a People's Republic of Texas is getting more and more real," Medvedev tweeted, adding that Gov. Greg Abbott's recent standoff with the White House over immigration enforcement could result in a "bloody civil war" that could cost "hundreds of thousands of lives."
Although Miller strongly refutes assertions that the TNM is connected with the Russian government, he doesn't necessarily oppose Moscow politicos' support for Texas secession.
"What we care about is making Texas independent," he said. "I don't care about who that makes happy or who that upsets."
From far-right to mainstream
It would be inaccurate to label TNM as a Russian front to disrupt American tranquility. The group's ranks include real Lone Star State residents who genuinely believe a Second Republic of Texas will emerge.
On Feb. 13, 70 or so of those supporters drove to the State Capitol, some from as far away as Lubbock and Houston, to watch Miller drop off a petition with 140,000 signatures verified by the Texas GOP demanding that Abbott call a special session to discuss Texas secession. TNM officials said they verified that all the signatures came from registered Texas voters.
One of those who made the trip to the Capitol was Dean Ross, whose said his X handle @DeanRoss34 has been accused of being operated by a Russian bot. During a conversation with the Current, he confirmed that he's an actual Texan and one of many eager to see the state return to its days as an independent republic.
Still, the NAFO member the Current spoke to for this story maintains that some of the accounts Ross interacts with via X are Russian bots. The online sleuth argues that adding that some legitimate TEXIT supporters may not even realize their followers or those commenting on their posts are doing so on Russia's behalf.
That's a problem, American University's Gallaher said.
Russian bot mills not only create misinformation but also actively promote false or divisive content via "coordinated link sharing," when one bot shares something from another bot or real person, according to the professor's research. If they share the information enough times, the rhetoric can seep into mainstream political discourse.
Indeed, according to the 2018 U.S. Senate report on Russian election interference, the Facebook page Heart of Texas specifically emphasized and promoted unproven claims that fraudulent votes cast by migrants helped the Democratic Party during the 2016 election cycle.
With Abbott's backing, the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature in 2021 passed a sweeping "election security" bill which civil-rights advocates have called one of the most restrictive pieces of voting legislation enacted in recent history. Lawmakers, including the governor, defended the proposal with debunked claims of rampant voter fraud.
Gallaher also points to the Republican Party's sudden fascination with child sex trafficking as something that was talked into existence via online chatter around the far-right Qanon conspiracy mill.
"The whole child sex trafficking thing was not an issue until Qanon made it an issue," she said. "Qanon came out of 8chan and that corner of the internet. But then you start seeing this getting repeated over and over again, and a lot of the accounts that were repeating it over and over again were Russian."
Indeed, Nathan Buchanan, a Republican running for Bexar County Sheriff this election cycle, told TNM members during a February meeting of the group's San Antonio chapter that stopping child sex trafficking was among his top priorities should he be elected.
"It would be harder to [spread disinformation] before social media and it would be harder if we had some unifying place that produced news," Gallaher said.
"That's not to say that the news has always been completely partisan, but we could debate. Those parameters have collapsed, and I don't think the Russians created it, but they boosted it."
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