How Wrestling Explains Alex Jones and Donald Trump

By NICK ROGERS NY Times

Alex Jones, the conspiracist at the helm of the alt-news outlet InfoWars, used an unusual defense in a custody hearing in Texas last week. His ex-wife had accused him of being unstable and dangerous, citing Mr. Jones’s rants on his daily call-in show. (Among his many unconventional stances are that the government staged the Sandy Hook massacre and orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.) Through his attorneys, Mr. Jones countered that his antics are irrelevant to his fitness as a parent, because he is a performance artist whose public behavior is part of his fictional character. In other words, when he tells his audience that Hillary Clinton is running a sex-trafficking operation out of a Washington pizza parlor (an accusation for which he has offered a rare retraction), he is doing so merely for entertainment value.

Many of his liberal critics have since asked whether Mr. Jones’s devoted fans will abandon him now that he has essentially admitted to being a fraud.

They will not.

Alex Jones’s audience adores him because of his artifice, not in spite of it. They admire a man who can identify their most primal feelings, validate them, and choreograph their release. To understand this, and to understand the political success of other figures like Donald Trump, it is helpful to know a term from the world of professional wrestling: “kayfabe.”

Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years “kayfabe” has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.

To a wrestling audience, the fake and the real coexist peacefully. If you ask a fan whether a match or backstage brawl was scripted, the question will seem irrelevant. You may as well ask a roller-coaster enthusiast whether he knows he’s not really on a runaway mine car. The artifice is not only understood but appreciated: The performer cares enough about the viewer’s emotions to want to influence them. Kayfabe isn’t about factual verifiability; it’s about emotional fidelity.

Although their athleticism is impressive, skilled wrestlers captivate because they do what sociologists call “emotional labor” — the professional management of other people’s feelings. Diners expect emotional labor from their servers, Hulkamaniacs demand it from their favorite performer, and a whole lot of voters desire it from their leaders.

The aesthetic of World Wrestling Entertainment seems to be spreading from the ring to the world stage. Ask an average Trump supporter whether he or she thinks the president actually plans to build a giant wall and have Mexico pay for it, and you might get an answer that boils down to, “I don’t think so, but I believe so.” That’s kayfabe. Chants of “Build the Wall” aren’t about erecting a structure; they’re about how cathartic it feels, in the moment, to yell with venom against a common enemy.

Voting to repeal Obamacare again and again only to face President Obama’s veto was kayfabe. So is shouting “You lie!” during a health care speech. It is President Bush in a flight suit, it is Vladimir Putin shirtless on a horse, it is virtually everything Kim Jong-un does. Does the intended audience know that what they’re watching is literally made for TV? Sure, in the same way they know that the wrestler Kane isn’t literally a demon. The factual fabrication is necessary to elicit an emotional clarity.

Despite superficial similarities, it is useful to distinguish kayfabe from the concept of satire. Satire depends on the constant awareness that what’s being presented is false. It requires frequent acknowledgment of that: winks to the camera, giggling breaks of character. The meaning comes directly from the disbelief. It depends on two conflicting mental processes happening at once, rather than the suspension of one in service of the other. It employs cognitive dissonance, rather than bypassing it. In that way, satire and kayfabe are actually opposites. Kayfabe isn’t merely a suspension of disbelief, it is philosophy about truth itself. It rests on the assumption that feelings are inherently more trustworthy than facts.

Donald Trump rode kayfabe from Queens to Trump Tower to “The Apprentice” to the White House. Alex Jones may find it is as effective in the courtroom as it is on AM radio. Cultural elites can fact-check these men and point out glaring rhetorical contradictions until they are blue in the face; kayfabe renders it all beside the point. If you’re among the three million people who have chuckled at the viral video of a crying man addressing his wrestling heroes at a Q. and A. session, you know how succinctly he summarizes the mind-set: “It’s still real to me, dammit.”

Are truth and kayfabe, then, irreconcilable? In some contexts, probably. But devotees of the former might be well served to think of the latter as complementary rather than competing. Rationalists can and should make the case that empirical data is more reliable than intuition. But if they continue to ignore the human need for things to feel true, they will do so at their political peril.

Nick Rogers is a sociologist and lawyer on Long Island.

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand’ s Counter-Revolution

Jennifer Burns NY Times

STANFORD, Calif. — The crowds jostling below, the soldiers marching down icy boulevards, the roar of a people possessed: All this a young Ayn Rand witnessed from her family’s apartment, perched high above the madness near Nevsky Prospekt, a central thoroughfare of Petrograd, the Russian city formerly known as St. Petersburg.

These February days were the first turn of a revolutionary cycle that would end in November and split world history into before and after, pitting soldier against citizen, republican against Bolshevik, Russian against Russian. But it wasn’t until Rand became a New Yorker, some 17 years later, that she realized the revolution had cleaved not only Russian society, but also intellectual life in her adopted homeland of the United States.

We usually think of the 1950s as the decade of anti-Communism, defined by Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Hollywood blacklist and the purging of suspected Communists from unions, schools and universities. The prelude to all of that was the 1930s, when the nation’s intellectuals first grappled with the meaning and significance of Russia’s revolution. And it was in this decade that Ayn Rand came to political consciousness, reworking her opposition to Soviet Communism into a powerful defense of the individual that would inspire generations of American conservatives.

Rand is best known as the author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” but before these came “We the Living,” the novel perhaps closest to her heart. It was certainly the novel closest to her life: The protagonist, a gifted engineering student named Kira Argounova, lived the life that might well have been Rand’s, had she stayed in the U.S.S.R. But whereas Kira died a dramatic death trying to escape over the snowy border into Latvia, Rand succeeded in emigrating in 1926 and soon made it to Hollywood, the “American movie city” she had written about as a Russian film student, which became her first home in the United States.

By the mid-1930s, after setting about a successful writing career and becoming an American citizen, Rand was ready to explain the country she left behind. “We the Living” depicted the quotidian gray of life after the drama of the October Revolution had faded. What was left was the cynical machinations of party insiders and the struggle to maintain a facade of gentility — one hostess served potato-skin cookies to guests, who “kept their arms pressed to their sides to hide the holes in their armpits; elbows motionless on their knees — to hide rubbed patches; feet deep under chairs — to hide worn felt boots.”

At the novel’s heart was the quiet despair of hopes crushed by new lines of class and caste, as students like Kira, punished for her family’s former prosperity, had their futures stripped away. For Rand, “We the Living” was more than a novel, it was a mission.

“No one has ever come out of Soviet Russia to tell it to the world,” she told her literary agent. “That was my job.”

Only, in 1930s America, few wanted to hear what she had to say. When the novel was published in 1936, capitalism itself was in crisis. The Great Depression had cast its dark shadow over the American dream. Bread lines snaked through the cities; Midwestern farms blew away in clouds of dust. Desperate men drifted across the country and filled up squatters’ camps of the homeless and workless on the outskirts of small towns, terrifying those who still had something to lose.

In this moment, Soviet Russia stood out to the nation’s thinking class as a sign of hope. Communism, it was believed, had helped Russia avoid the worst ravages of the crash. Tides of educated opinion began running strong to the left.

“These were the first quotas of the great drift from Columbia, Harvard and elsewhere,” the American writer — and former Soviet spy — Whittaker Chambers wrote in his 1952 book “Witness.” “A small intellectual army passed over to the Communist Party with scarcely any effort on its part.”

This intellectual army had little interest in a melodramatic novel about the sufferings of the bourgeoisie. Worse, views of the book reflected an ideological divide that Rand had not known existed. Rand had taken for granted there would be “pinks” in America, but she hadn’t known they would matter, certainly not in New York City, one of the literary capitals of the world.

But the champions she found were outsiders of that milieu, like the newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken. Even reviewers who enjoyed her writing, though, generally assumed Rand’s rendition of Soviet Russia in “We the Living” was exaggerated or no longer true, now that Communism had matured.

Rand had thus stumbled, unwittingly, into a drama that would shape American thought and politics for the rest of the century: a bitter love triangle between Communists, ex-Communists and anti-Communists.

First came the Communists, often literary men like Chambers, John Reed (of “Ten Days That Shook the World” fame) or Will Herberg. A handful of the most prominent Bolshevik enthusiasts were women, including the dancer Isadora Duncan and Gerda Lerner, a later pioneer of women’s history.

Next were the ex-Communists. For many, 1939 was the fateful year, when Soviet Russia signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, previously its mortal enemy. The reversal was too much for all but the most hardened American leftists — after all, it was the fight against fascism that had drawn many to the cause in the first place. (In an interesting twist, Italian filmmakers produced a pirated film adaptation of “We the Living” as an anti-fascist statement, which was later banned by Mussolini’s government.) The great drift into the Communist Party U.S.A. became the great drift out of it.

Still, to be an ex-Communist was not necessarily to be an anti-Communist, at least not immediately. Rand was one of the first, and not because she had lost her faith, but because she was an émigré who had witnessed the Russian Revolution from the inside.

Finally, in the 1950s, anti-Communism became a full-fledged intellectual and political movement. Chambers made the most spectacular move from Communist to ex-Communist, to anti-Communist, revealing his participation in an espionage ring and implicating several high-ranking government employees, including Alger Hiss, the former State Department official who was accused of being a Soviet agent.

Chambers’s revelations helped touch off McCarthy’s crusade against suspected Communists in government. Rand herself got in on the action, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee about Communist infiltration of Hollywood.

And here unfolded the last act of the drama: the eventual emergence of anti-anti-Communism. It was one thing to reject a political movement gone horribly wrong. It was something different to turn on one’s former friends and associates, in the process giving “aid and comfort to cold warriors,” as the writer and historian Tony Judt wrote. And so even as Communism fell out of favor, among intellectuals anti-Communism became as unfashionable as it had been in the 1930s.

Once again, Rand was a talismanic presence. By the 1950s, her anti-Communism had evolved into a full-throated celebration of capitalism, buttressed by her original credibility as a survivor of Soviet collectivism. She had traded in the elegiac historical fiction of “We the Living” for another Soviet inheritance: agitprop novels, dedicated to showcasing heroic individualists and entrepreneurs. By 1957, she had fully realized the form in “Atlas Shrugged,” an epic that weighed in at Tolstoyan proportions.

Rand had found her voice — and her audience. “Atlas Shrugged” became a best seller, despite poor reviews — Rand would never get the critical respect she craved. The gap between Rand and her fellow novelists and writers, first evident in the 1930s, would never close.

There's nothing inherently attractive about working down a coal mine. I've never done it myself, but it seems like hard physical labour, often in cramped conditions, with a view from the office that leaves a lot to be desired. In the short run, there's the danger of explosions and collapses to contend with, while black lung disease is the long-run killer that ensures there's always room at the bar in a miners' welfare club.

Yet when President Trump flourished his executive pen a few weeks ago to roll back Obama-era environmental protection regulations, he was surrounded by West Virginian miners excited at the prospect of getting back down the pit. For Trump, the politics were obvious. These were the people he had diligently courted for nearly two years and whom he had brandished as icons of the besieged American worker. In the Republican primaries, Trump won over 90% of the votes in McDowell County, the traditional heart of West Virginia coal country, on the back of his promise to put them back to work and end the 'war on coal'. 

In the Trump coalition, it would be hard to find a more archetypal white working-class community than the miners. In 2016, the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that minority employment (African American, Asian, and Latino) in the coal mining industry was a mere 5% versus 35% in the overall US workforce. Rolling back clean energy regulations is also a chance for Trump to burnish his credentials with traditional Republicans for whom even the rhetorical resurrection of the coal industry is a middle finger to the lefty pinko climate change panic merchants ruining the American economy. Nothing says we deny global warming like a smoke stack belching sulphurous coal fumes into the atmosphere. 

Yet the miners flanking Trump were just props in a piece of pure political theatre, with the further irony that Trump didn't even get to the part in the script where he takes away their medical coverage and defunds the Appalachian Economic Development Agency tasked with creating alternative jobs. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of energy economics knows that – regardless of what Trump says or does – the US coal industry is not about to rise Lazarus-like from decades of decline, and the villain isn't increased regulations, but rather the market economics beloved of traditional Republicans. 

The reality is that the combination of abundant natural gas, plus increasingly cheap renewable energy, has made coal uneconomic. 2016 was the first year in which natural gas generated more electricity than coal in the US, and as power generation accounts for the overwhelming majority of coal consumption, the result is production at multi-decade lows, and a string of major coal producers filing for bankruptcy over the last few years. 

The impact on the miners of declining production is amplified by increased automation. When US mining companies stopped digging under mountains and instead started blowing the tops off them to shovel up the debris, far fewer workers were required. By far the most cost effective coal producing region in the US is the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, where vast strip mines scar the landscape. But in the traditional mining heartlands like Eastern Kentucky, the world has moved on. By the end of 2016, coal mining employment in Kentucky was at its lowest level in over a century. 

To put the industry into perspective, the American coal sector now employs only 53,000 people. It still dwarfs the UK coal industry which is down to a few thousand workers in a handful of open cast mines, but in US economic terms it's now a rounding error. Last year the industry employed 2,000 fewer people than the 'retail sewing' sector, yet you don't see the quilt makers of America jostling for photo ops in the Oval Office.

So why has Trump latched onto the idea that coal mining is an industry that must be saved at all costs? It's for the same reason that he pedals the fantasy of bringing steel mills back to Ohio – a nostalgia for an industrial America that shaped and supported working-class communities and which technological progress is inexorably erasing. The truth, whether it's miners in West Virginia or shipyard workers on the Clyde, is that hard physical work in homogenous communities created social bonds and social capital that isn't easily replaced. Whether those communities are in the remote valleys of Appalachia or the somewhat less remote valleys of South Wales, the closing of a mine wreaks social havoc. 

Thirty years on from Arthur Scargill's failed strike, the parallels are clear. It wasn't just about jobs and economics, it was about trying to protect a way of life that, while dirty and dangerous, was also unique. The jobs may eventually be replaced, but loose networks of Uber drivers are unlikely to spawn many male voice choirs, world-class brass bands, or the social and cultural corona that surrounded the pits. A key insight from J D Vance's recent award-winning Appalachian family history, 'Hillbilly Elegy', is that when the social capital anchored in a concentration of traditional jobs gets eroded, whole communities can descend into a purposeless existence in which drug abuse, alcoholism and domestic violence find fertile ground.

The political current that Trump has expertly tapped into is the need for 'meaningful work' rather than just a job. When you're powering the country, launching ocean liners, or building cars to export to the world, there's a sense of purpose that a zero-hours contract stacking the shelves in a Walmart struggles to replicate. Sherrod Brown, a Democratic senator from Ohio, wrote in a recent op-ed for the New York Times, 'People take pride in the things they make, in serving their communities in hospitals or schools, and in making their contribution to society. When we devalue work, we threaten the pride and dignity that come from it.'

In the long run of economic history, the decline of mining and the erosion of the social fabric around it is nothing special. Neither is the search for 'meaningful work'. In 1853, a full century before what many Americans would consider the pinnacle of their industrial power, Henry David Thoreau, the American poet and essayist, lamented that 'most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.' 

The nature of economic progress has always been that we fail to imagine what might come next to fill the void caused by the decline of what came before. In Dundee's heyday of jute, jam and journalism, the creation of Grand Theft Auto and the emergence of a thriving video games cluster would have been literally unimaginable. That is why Trump's luddite tendencies have been with us for centuries, sarcastically illustrated by French 19th-century economist Frederic Bastiat, whose 'candlemaker's petition' demanded that the French parliament blot out the sun to protect lighting jobs.

The economic cycle of creative destruction is personally very disruptive if you're a miner in Eastern Kentucky, or a steel worker in Motherwell, but at the national level it's been a consistent source of new employment. In the 15 years after containers were introduced, 90% of dock workers in the US lost their jobs, and the social ecosystem of pubs, crime, and prostitution that used to characterise the docks of the world gave way to vast automated ports in which people are few and far between. Yet the Brooklyn waterfront warehouses that once stored dry goods now hum with internet start-ups (and the occasional failed presidential campaign), and Finnieston in Glasgow is now becoming as famous for its trendy restaurants as it was for its crane. 

As dock jobs evaporated, many workers found themselves behind a wheel, as containerisation fuelled the growth of the long-distance truck industry that now employs nearly 2 million people in the US, but which itself is soon likely to be disrupted by driverless vehicles. For the remaining miners, the long wave of demand for coal kicked off by Trevithick, Watt, and Stephenson in the 19th century has crested and receded, and their jobs will inevitably go the way of the longshoreman, hopefully to be replaced by something unimagined but meaningful. 

Yet the economic pessimists share Thoreau's concern that this time it might be different. That Trump's electoral appeal as an economic King Canute standing athwart the tide of progress reflects a fear that we've now reached a point where automation will prevent the economy creating new 'meaningful jobs'. That fear may seem strange in an America where unemployment is now below 5%, but as economist Thomas Piketty has pointed out, the long-run growth in income inequality can be directly traced to a decline in the return to labour in favour of the return to capital – a trend that has seen the rich get richer and the working poor scrambling to make ends meet. 

If the supply of 'meaningful jobs' does indeed start drying up because of increased automation, it will raise broader societal questions. In India and Scandinavia there's already active discussion of moving to a guaranteed minimum income as a redistributive mechanism, but that alone won't address the issue of the dignity of work, hence the attraction of a demagogue who promises to bring back 'real jobs'. If those jobs don't appear organically, we could find ourselves back to something that looks like Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration of the 1930s. Not just a guaranteed income, but a guaranteed job to go with it, and the promise of doing something worthwhile, rather than just being a benefits scrounger.

As the need for labour declines, we'll also need to find ways to create social capital, as rotary clubs and bowling leagues don't spring spontaneously from lines at the benefits office. The optimists see a future where, like retired people searching for continued meaning in their life, we become a society of woodworkers, local history researchers and artists. But that transition will require a level of political acumen that seems to be beyond the current cohort of politicians in the US who are content to try and turn back the clock and collectively send us straight down the mines again.

Russia Moves to Ban Jehovah’s Witnesses as ‘Extremist’

By ANDREW HIGGINS NY TIMES

VOROKHOBINO, Russia — A dedicated pacifist who has never even held a gun, Andrei Sivak discovered that his government considered him a dangerous extremist when he tried to change some money and the teller “suddenly looked up at me with a face full of fear.”

His name had popped up on the exchangalee bureau’s computer system, along with those of members of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other militant groups responsible for shocking acts of violence.

The only group the 43-year-old father of three has ever belonged to, however, is (Photo of Charles Russell JW Founder 1874) Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination committed to the belief that the Bible must be taken literally, particularly its injunction “Thou shalt not kill.”

Yet, in a throwback to the days of the Soviet Union, when Jehovah’s Witnesses were hounded as spies and malcontents by the K.G.B., the denomination is at the center of an escalating campaign by the authorities to curtail religious groups that compete with the Russian Orthodox Church and that challenge President Vladimir V. Putin’s efforts to rally the country behind traditional and often militaristic patriotic values.

The Justice Ministry on Thursday put the headquarters of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia, an office complex near St. Petersburg, on a list of the bodies banned “in connection with the carrying out of extremist activities.”

Last month, the ministry asked the Supreme Court to outlaw the religious organization and stop its more than 170,000 Russian members from spreading “extremist” texts. The court is scheduled to hear — and is likely to rule on — the case on Wednesday.

Extremism, as defined by a law passed in 2002 but amended and expanded several times since, has become a catchall charge that can be deployed against just about anybody, as it has been against some of those involved in recent anti-corruption protests in Moscow and scores of other cities.

Several students who took part in demonstrations in the Siberian city of Tomsk are now being investigated by a special anti-extremism unit while Leonid Volkov, the senior aide to the jailed protest leader Aleksei A. Navalny, said he had himself been detained last week under the extremism law.

In the case of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the putative extremism seems to derive mostly from the group’s absolute opposition to violence, a stand that infuriated Soviet and now Russian authorities whose legitimacy rests in large part on the celebration of martial triumphs, most notably over Nazi Germany in World War II but also over rebels in Syria.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, members of a denomination founded in the United States in the 19th century and active in Russia for more than 100 years, refuse military service, do not vote and view God as the only true leader. They shun the patriotic festivals promoted with gusto by the Kremlin, like the annual celebration of victory in 1945 and recent events to celebrate the annexation of Crimea in March 2014.

Mr. Sivak, who says he lost his job as a physical education teacher because of his role as a Jehovah’s Witnesses elder, said he had voted for Mr. Putin in 2000, three years before joining the denomination. He added that while he has not voted since, nor has he supported anti-Kremlin activities of the sort that usually attract the attention of Russia’s post-Soviet version of the K.G.B., the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B.

“I have absolutely no interest in politics,” he said during a recent Jehovah’s Witnesses Friday service in a wooden country house in Vorokhobino, a snow-covered village north of Moscow. Around 100 worshipers crammed into a long, chilly room under fluorescent lights to listen to readings from the Bible, sing and watch a video advising them to dress for worship as they would for a meeting with the president.

“From the Russian state’s perspective, Jehovah’s Witnesses are completely separate,” said Geraldine Fagan, the author of “Believing in Russia — Religious Policy After Communism.” She added, “They don’t get involved in politics, but this is itself seen as a suspicious political deviation.”

“The idea of independent and public religious activity that is completely outside the control of — and also indifferent to — the state sets all sorts of alarm bells ringing in the Orthodox Church and the security services,” she said.

That the worldwide headquarters of Jehovah’s Witnesses is in the United States and that its publications are mostly prepared there, Ms. Fagan added, “all adds up to a big conspiracy theory” for the increasingly assertive F.S.B.

For Mr. Sivak, it has added up to a long legal nightmare. His troubles began, he said, when undercover security officers posed as worshipers and secretly filmed a service where he was helping to officiate in 2010.

Accused of “inciting hatred and disparaging the human dignity of citizens,” he was put on trial for extremism along with a second elder, Vyacheslav Stepanov, 40. The prosecutor’s case, heard by a municipal court in Sergiyev Posad, a center of the Russian Orthodox Church, produced no evidence of extremism and focused instead on the insufficient patriotism of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“Their disregard for the state,” a report prepared for the prosecution said, “erodes any sense of civic affiliation and promotes the destruction of national and state security.”

In a ruling last year, the court found the two men not guilty and their ordeal seemed over — until Mr. Sivak tried to change money and was told that he had been placed on a list of “terrorists and extremists.”

He and Mr. Stepanov now face new charges of extremism and are to appear before a regional court this month. “There is a big wave of repression breaking,” Mr. Stepanov said.

In response to written questions, the Justice Ministry in Moscow said a yearlong review of documents at the Jehovah’s Witnesses “administrative center” near St. Petersburg had uncovered violations of a Russian law banning extremism. As a result, it added, the center should be “liquidated,” along with nearly 400 locally registered branches of the group and other structures.

For the denomination’s leaders inside Russia, the sharp escalation in a long campaign of harassment, previously driven mostly by local officials, drew horrifying flashbacks to the Soviet era.

Vasily Kalin, the chairman of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Russian arm, recalled that his whole family had been deported to Siberia when he was a child. “It is sad and reprehensible that my children and grandchildren should be facing a similar fate,” he said. “Never did I expect that we would again face the threat of religious persecution in modern Russia.”

In Russia, as in many countries, the door-to-door proselytizing of Jehovah’s Witnesses often causes irritation, and their theological idiosyncrasies disturb many mainstream Christians. The group has also been widely criticized for saying that the Bible prohibits blood transfusions. But it has never promoted violent or even peaceful political resistance.

“I cannot imagine that anyone really thinks they are a threat,” said Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, which monitors extremism in Russia. “But they are seen as a good target. They are pacifists, so they cannot be radicalized, no matter what you do to them. They can be used to send a message.”

That message, it would seem, is that everyone needs to get with the Putin program — or risk being branded as an extremist if they display indifference, never mind hostility, to the Kremlin’s drive to make Russia a great power again.

“A big reason they are being targeted is simply that they are an easy target,” Ms. Fagan said. “They don’t vote, so nobody is going to lose votes by attacking them.”

Attacking Jehovah’s Witnesses also sends a signal that even the mildest deviation from the norm, if proclaimed publicly and insistently, can be punished under the anti-extremism law, which was passed after Russia’s second war in Chechnya and the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

Billed as a move by Russia to join a worldwide struggle against terrorism, the law prohibited “incitement of racial, national or religious strife, and social hatred associated with violence or calls for violence.”

But the reference to violence was later deleted, opening the way for the authorities to classify as extremist any group claiming to offer a unique, true path to religious or political salvation.

Even the Russian Orthodox Church has sometimes fallen afoul of the law: The slogan “Orthodoxy or Death!” — a rallying cry embraced by some hard-line believers — has been banned as an illegal extremist text.

To help protect the Orthodox Church and other established religions, Parliament passed a law in 2015 to exempt the Bible and the Quran, as well as Jewish and Buddhist scripture, from charges of extremism based on their claims to offer the only true faith.

The main impetus for the current crackdown, however, appears to come from the security services, not the Orthodox Church. Roman Lunkin, director of the Institute of Religion and Law, a Moscow research group, described it as “part of a broad policy of suppressing all nongovernmental organizations” that has gained particular force because of the highly centralized structure of Jehovah’s Witnesses under a worldwide leadership based in the United States.

“They are controlled from outside Russia and this is very suspicious for our secret services,” he said. “They don’t like having an organization that they do not and cannot control.”

Artyom Grigoryan, a former Jehovah’s Witness who used to work at the group’s Russian headquarters but who now follows the Orthodox Church, said the organization had “many positive elements,” like its ban on excessive drinking, smoking and other unhealthy habits.

All the same, he said it deserved to be treated with suspicion. “Look at it from the view of the state,” he said. “Here is an organization that is run from America, that gets financing from abroad, and whose members don’t serve in the army and don’t vote.”

Estranged from his parents, who are still members and view his departure as sinful, he said Jehovah’s Witnesses broke up families and “in the logic of the state, it presents a threat.”

He added, “I am not saying this is real or not, but it needs to be checked by objective experts.”

Mr. Sivak, now preparing for yet another trial, said he had always tried to follow the law and he respected the state, but could not put its interests above the commands of his faith.

“They say I am a terrorist,” he said, “but all I ever wanted to do was to get people to pay attention to the Bible.”