On a Tuesday, a video appeared on X that had all the ingredients of a political bombshell. An account claiming to belong to a Texas man named Zyron Lewis showed a person identifying himself as Lewis telling a sickening story: back in 2012, when he was a middle school student, he said, he had been sexually assaulted by James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas. The clip zapped across the internet before anyone could ask basic questions. It turned out there were very good reasons to ask them. Talarico really had been a middle school teacher in 2012, and a Zyron Lewis really had been his student. But the man in the video was not the real Zyron Lewis. The actual Lewis told a fact-checking site that Talarico had never abused him, and X suspended the impersonator. The smear collapsed, but it left a lingering chill. This was not just another ugly campaign trick. It was a rerun of a Russian operation, one that disinformation trackers quickly tied to the same network known as Storm-1516 that had targeted Tim Walz in 2024 with a fabricated accusation of sexual abuse. The fake Talarico video was a sign that Vladimir Putin’s disinformation machine is still at work in American politics, still willing to ruin a person’s reputation with a lie, and still betting that the outrage machine will move faster than the truth. It was a small, ugly reminder that election interference is not only about hacking servers or stealing data; it is about poisoning the human mind, one share at a time. And because the internet has no memory, the debunking often arrives too late, after the damage is already done, after the accusations have been embedded in millions of feeds and the emotional residue of the lie lingers even when the facts change.
Mother Jones and other outlets have been tracking this latest wave of Russian meddling, and the pattern is unmistakable. For about a month, Russian operatives have been circulating fake videos on American social media platforms, each one aimed at smearing a Democratic candidate. The videos are made to look like legitimate reports from CNN or Mother Jones, complete with chyrons and graphics, and they contain lurid, made-up accusations. One falsely claimed that a Democratic gubernatorial candidate had recruited minors into sex work and, while working for the Girl Scouts, had organized sex parties for members of the Democratic Party. Another accused a different Democratic gubernatorial nominee of selling crack to college students, a crime the video said had “resulted in 17 deaths.” To give the fiction a false sense of authority, the videos cited a book that supposedly exposed all this: Enemies of Democracy for Dummies, attributed to David Corn. The book does not exist. Corn’s actual book, just published, is called How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America. It is not a parody or a hoax; it is a serious account of the decade-long twilight war Moscow has been waging against the United States, a shadow campaign of disinformation and influence operations that has been aimed at every American election since 2016 with the goal of helping Donald Trump. The book also tells the story of the Walz smear, which succeeded in getting tens of millions of Americans to see a completely false allegation. The latest batch of Russian-made attacks on Democratic candidates seems to have been nipped in the bud—so far. But their existence tells us what Putin wants: he wants Trump to hold on to Congress, and he wants to keep the American public confused, angry, and distrustful. This is not surprising, given Trump’s recent moves to tighten his bond with Putin and reduce, if not end, US support for Ukraine. With time left before Election Day, the operatives are likely preparing new ways to exploit any chaos Trump may generate before, during, and after the vote. The Talarico video might have been smothered, but it is a warning flare, not an all-clear.
The story of the Walz smear, which Corn recounts in detail, shows how this kind of operation actually works. It began on October 5, 2024, when John Mark Dougan appeared on a fringe podcast called Red Pill News. Dougan was a former Florida police officer who had been indicted for extortion and wiretapping, fled to Russia, and built a vast network of fake news sites designed to spread pro-Russian propaganda. The podcast was hosted by Zak Paine, a QAnon-promoting figure who said he had been at the US Capitol on January 6. Dougan brought an anonymous guest called “Rick,” who said he was from Kazakhstan. Speaking in English with his voice apparently altered, Rick claimed that in 2004 and 2005, he had been a foreign exchange student at the Minnesota high school where Walz had taught and coached football, and that Walz had touched him inappropriately. As Dougan sipped wine and nodded along, Rick spun a long, detailed story that Paine interpreted as classic grooming by a pedophile. The story had a problem: Rick said he had attended the school through a State Department-funded exchange program, but NewsGuard, a disinformation tracking site, found no record of a student from Kazakhstan at that school at that time. The episode was nevertheless carried on Rumble and other platforms. The truth didn’t matter, because the story was designed not to withstand scrutiny but to outrun it. It was built to be shared, to feel raw and confessional, to trigger the instant revulsion that makes people hit retweet before they hit search. That is the whole point of this kind of operation: to create a lie so ugly that the first reaction is emotional, not skeptical.
Once the podcast was out there, the Storm-1516 network went to work. Two days later, The Miami Chronicle, one of the fake news sites in the network, began sharing video of Rick’s allegations and actively promoting it to conservative commentators with large followings. “Did you see the exchange student from Kazakhstan who gave the interview about how he was sexually groomed by Tim Walz?” the account asked, adding that Elon Musk “needs to hear about this.” On October 12, Juanita Broaddrick—who had accused Bill Clinton of rape decades earlier and was now a right-wing social media influencer—posted the Red Pill News footage to X, where it drew nearly half a million views. Other far-right accounts picked it up. Then came the account known as Black Insurrectionist, a conspiracy-monger who shared a clip that was viewed over 800,000 times. He also posted supposed emails from the victim, which other X users quickly exposed as fakes. Black Insurrectionist flooded the zone with two dozen posts promoting the allegation, amassing more than 33 million views, according to Wired, before the account disappeared. The Associated Press later reported that the account was linked to a 51-year-old white man named Jason Palmer in upstate New York, a man with a history of drug addiction, alleged business fraud, and nearly $7 million in unpaid state taxes. Another X conspiracist posted a video claiming he had talked to the supposed victim, offering no evidence, and drew millions of views. A separate deepfake video featured a different former student making the same allegation; it got over 4 million views before being deleted. The account that posted the deepfake also spread a fake video of mail-in ballots being destroyed in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a clip that disinformation researchers attributed to Storm-1516. Then the big names arrived: Jack Posobiec, the MAGA activist and former Pizzagate proponent, and Candace Owens, the right-wing influencer, both treated the allegation as something worth taking seriously. Owens discussed it on her podcast and drew 630,000 views. Foreign newspapers picked up the story. Dougan, the former cop who had launched the operation, fanned the flames by publishing an article that combined the deepfake, the Red Pill News episode, and Black Insurrectionist’s posts across more than 100 of his bogus websites. What had begun as a lie on a fringe podcast had become a global news event, all within a matter of days.
The infrastructure behind the lie eventually became visible. The Washington Post obtained Russian documents, passed along by a European intelligence service, showing that Dougan had received funds from Russian military intelligence. The documents also showed he had received financing from the Center for Geopolitical Expertise, an organization founded by the pro-Putin, far-right Russian nationalist Aleksandr Dugin. Dougan’s contact at the center was its head, Valery Korovin, who had been honored by Putin in 2023 for “services to the Fatherland” for “carrying out special tasks.” Four years earlier, Korovin had written to Russia’s Ministry of Defense proposing that the center mount “an internet war against the U.S. on its territory.” In his letter, he explained that cyber operations and gray-zone warfare were how Moscow could best confront the militarily superior United States and achieve equal standing. “The possibilities posed by internet wars really are limitless,” he wrote, “and only with their help can we assert complete strategic parity with our geopolitical opponents.” Dougan denied all of it, claiming the documents were fake. Disinformation researchers had little doubt that the Walz attack was a Russian active measure orchestrated by Storm-1516. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement essentially confirming that conclusion, saying that “Russian influence actors manufactured and amplified inauthentic content claiming illegal activity committed by the Democratic vice-presidential candidate during his earlier career.” At briefings before the 2024 election, intelligence officials said they were bracing for Russian operations designed to create chaos on Election Day and after—operations that could undermine confidence in the vote count and even incite violence. When Trump won, those operations were no longer necessary. The storm had passed, but the system that created it remains.
What makes this so unsettling is that the real victims are not just the politicians being smeared, but ordinary people caught in the blast radius. The fake Talarico video stole the identity of a real former student and used it to attack a teacher. The Walz lie invented a victim who never existed, yet it made millions of Americans believe a governor and former high school teacher was a sexual predator. These operations are designed to feel true. They arrive in the form of a grainy video, a breathless tweet, a fake news site with a credible name. They exploit the most human instincts—the desire to protect children, the fear that the powerful are hiding terrible secrets—and turn those instincts into weapons. The Russian playbook is not subtle. It doesn’t need to convince everyone; it only needs to create enough doubt, anger, and fatigue to make people stop trusting anything. For every person who pauses to fact-check, there are hundreds who share without thinking. Algorithms do the rest. The Talarico smear was smothered before it could cause real damage, but it should be read as a warning. Putin’s operatives are still here, still watching, still adapting. They are likely preparing to do whatever they can to amplify any crisis or chaos Trump tries to generate before, during, and after Election Day. The best defense is not just debunking each individual lie, but understanding the larger story—that this is a deliberate, ongoing war on American trust. That is the story David Corn tells in How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, a book that chronicles a decade of shadow warfare against American democracy. It is not a comfortable story, but it is a necessary one. It ends when ordinary citizens decide that they will not be played.