Washington has accused Moscow of attempting to use the media to manipulate public opinion ahead of the presidential election
Washington’s attempts to silence Russian media ahead of the 2024 US presidential election is an attempt to hide the truth from the American people, according to action movie star Steven Seagal.
On Wednesday, the US Treasury announced a new round of sanctions on Russian media figures, including RT executives, for allegedly waging a “malign” government-sponsored influence campaign to manipulate American public opinion ahead of the election in November.
The US Justice Department has also unsealed indictments against two Russian citizens for supposedly violating the 1939 Foreign Agents Registration act and producing English-language content for American audiences on behalf of the Russian government.
Speaking to RT on Thursday, Seagal said this is not the first time Washington has done something like this and will likely do so before every election, “because they’re very afraid of the truth and they are highly cognizant of the fact that they are engaging in skullduggery that is going to be exposed.”
The actor went on to say that most Americans have been waking up to the fact that they are constantly being lied to and manipulated by their own government and media, and provided the example of US President Joe Biden, who “can’t complete a sentence and can’t walk without falling down.” White House officials as well as most legacy media outlets in the US have for years dismissed concerns of the aging president’s physical and mental health.
Seagal believes the US “disinformation machine” is designed for the sole purpose of destroying the image of Russia and its people, and that misinformation and propaganda are the only tools Washington has left at this point, outside of staging a coup in the country or deposing its leader.
Russian officials have also weighed in on the targeting of RT and other media channels, with Moscow’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, suggesting that the Democrats are trying to “shift some of the blame for their mistakes during the electoral struggle to Russia” and justify their actions by using “lies” and “trying to discredit Russian media.”
“Their goal is clear – to cleanse the information space of inconvenient truth. To thicken the atmosphere of Russophobia, blaming their own failures on external factors,” Antonov said.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the measures point to the “irreversible degradation” of democratic values in the US and its “transformation into a totalitarian neoliberal dictatorship.”
