Teaching the most pro-American nation to hate America

By Emzari Gelashvili
Real Clear Wire

There is a street in Tbilisi named after George W. Bush. Count the capitals on earth with a street named for an American president. It will not take you long.

For years, Georgia was the largest non-NATO contributor of troops in Afghanistan. For years, IRI polling told the same story: roughly three-quarters of Georgians backed a pro-Western course. I come from a family that spent three generations inside the Soviet system. We know what America is worth. We know precisely because we remember what it is like without it.

Today the same people curse America.

This did not happen on its own. It is taught. And it is taught from two directions at once — in stereo.

The First Dynamic
The first voice is familiar and expected: Bidzina Ivanishvili's state machine and its propaganda media, echoing Russian narratives. The "Global War Party." The "deep state." Washington as the headquarters of conspiracy. For years this voice has told Georgians that America is the enemy — while its authors also sell their own audience the illusion of a negotiation.

On April 29, Prime Minister Kobakhidze announced that by the end of May the public would see concrete results in relations with the United States, along concrete lines. The same day, the U.S. Embassy answered: we have nothing to announce at this time.

May came and went. No one saw the results.

The same machine used the airwaves of the television channel Imedi — a channel that, on February 24, 2026, the United Kingdom sanctioned for spreading "deliberately misleading information" about Ukraine — to brand Ms. Ia Parulava, a woman who walks into demonstrations carrying the American flag, as an "organizer of violent protests." Her own words about uniting the opposition around the MEGOBARI Act — a U.S. bill whose name means "friend" in Georgian — had been sliced so that the headline read like an admission that she was acting on orders. On August 21, 2025, that identical headline, word for word, appeared in eight more outlets — on a single day. All of it is recorded in a notarized act: the links, the screenshots, the corporate registration numbers of the outlets that ran it. One headline. One day. Nine "independent" newsrooms. Remember this name. She will return in this article.

So far, everything is logical. An authoritarian regime tilting toward Russia is smearing America. That is the first page of the Lukashenko playbook.

The surprise begins with the second dynamic.

The Second Dynamic
The second voice comes from the direction no one expected: the opposition media and the opposition's own leaders — a camp that calls itself pro-Western.

Someone will object here: criticizing Trump is not cursing America. True. The distinction matters, and I will hold to it. So watch the ladder instead.

It begins with the man. Trump is Putin's lobbyist, a clown, a criminal. Then it widens to his administration: the cabinet is bought, the diplomacy is capitulation. Then to the party: Republican senators and congressmen are corrupt. And at the end of that ladder — after years of climbing it every evening — the audience stops making distinctions at all. What is left is not a president. Not a party. A country.

No one announces the last step. No one has to. Climb the first three every night for six years, and the fourth arrives on its own. This is not a hypothesis. It is plainly visible — in the comment threads under those same broadcasts, in the Georgian Facebook feeds, on the street.

Mtavari, which went from television channel to online outlet, frames Trump in a systematically mocking register: sometimes a Truth Social photo turned into "Atlas," sometimes a sarcastic line — "I would have been the greatest communist in history" — served up so that it reads as a straight declaration. The context is stripped away. This is not accident. It is editorial policy.

The channel's founder, Nika Gvaramia, spent Election Day 2024 mocking the "document-carrying Georgian émigrés" living in America and seeing in their choice a case of "Darwinian natural selection." In February he summed up Trump's diplomacy this way: "Let Russia annex Crimea and Donbas, and China take Taiwan. Got it?" And in May the same Gvaramia led people onto Rustaveli Avenue — with an appeal addressed to Secretary of State Rubio: "Bidzina left us without friends; we must turn to our friends ourselves."

In February, America is a punchline. In May, a friend you beg for help. One leader, two registers, one audience.

Shalva Natelashvili's trajectory runs longer and straighter still. November 2, 2020, on air: I hope the American people remove Trump — "Putin's lobbyist in the United States." February 2024, on air again: Trump's election is "impermissible for the security of the entire world." And in 2026, as the MEGOBARI Act sat in the Senate without a vote, he wrote to Ia Parulava in private messages: the act was being blocked "on Trump's direct instruction," with "Kushner's protection and Moscow's request." Ia asked how he knew. The answer was a single word:

"Ours."

Six years. One narrative. Zero sources.

The last stroke was added to that arc only recently. When Trump named Mullin his Secretary of Homeland Security, Natelashvili sent off the "friend-of-the-act-blocking" senator with a public post: "a Cherokee, an experienced plumber, but unfortunately he couldn't even find time to finish school" — and advised Trump to pick "principled people for his government, not a few who run around with flags."

And there is a voice heard everywhere. Roman Gotsiridze is effectively the only opposition economist every program invites — and he is precisely whom the opposition-minded viewer listens to. His feed is written in a single register: Trump's policy is "a black day for American business"; every delay of sanctions "pours water on Russia's mill"; America's new strategy is "bad for the world and for Georgia, good for Russia"; Trump "did the impossible — he helped create an alliance of Russia, China, and India." Taken one at a time, each of these is legitimate criticism. But when the only economist the entire opposition audience listens to speaks about America for months in this register alone, the cumulative lesson is unambiguous.

On the channel Formula, Misha Mshvildadze's comedy program has become a permanent segment for ridiculing Trump and his team. Mshvildadze himself is a co-owner, producer, and host of Formula — after the channel's founder, David Kezerashvili, a former minister convicted in absentia, "redistributed shares to employees" amid scandal. How they were redistributed we know from the channel's own airwaves — from Zuka Gumbaridze's public statement: "I decided to hand my share in Formula to Misha Mshvildadze, so that he could distribute it at his own discretion among the channel's management and staff." As a result, Mshvildadze is both director and the principal shareholder. And one chronological detail: before the U.S. presidential election, under the Biden administration, Mshvildadze spent a week in Washington for media training — and upon returning, devoted his first program to cursing Trump. Since then the segment has not stopped. And when I pointed — warmly, as a friend — to disinformation spread on one specific subject, with facts and sources, he first insulted me and then blocked me so I could not answer.

On the channel TV Pirveli, meanwhile, an episode occurred that deserves separate description.

Ia Parulava — the same woman Imedi branded an "organizer of violent protests" — was invited onto Diana Trapaidze's program to discuss the MEGOBARI Act petition. The agreement was clear: the petition's QR code was to stay on screen throughout the conversation. On air, the QR appeared twice, for some sixty seconds in total. And even in those sixty seconds the code turned out to be altered — its caption, removed without asking Ia, had read: Make Georgia Great Again.

This no longer looks like a technical error.

Tabula's editor-in-chief, Levan Sutidze, insulted Ia Parulava publicly, under his own name: "Go feed your three neural anomalies to that Botkin-colored show, find your equal and roll your dice"; "not one region of your brain is capable of judging the... vicissitudes... of American politics, and don't you dare come back here again." That is how a publication's editor-in-chief speaks to a woman who is talking about spreading accurate information. Around Tabula and the YouTube channel Dario, a separate picture takes shape. In late May, on Dario, the Federalists' leader Tamar Chergoleishvili framed her own position this way: "We are the only party that maintains a relationship with America... we, as Federalists, were the ones invited." By the channel's own description, Bokeria and Chergoleishvili spent a week in Washington. And the host conducting the interview said on air that the Federalists' platform "echoes his own creed one to one," that he agrees with Bokeria's views "by 99 percent," and that he takes part in the process himself.

Media that is a party. A party that is media. And the central message: America relies only on us.

If all this were ignorance, it could be corrected. But my experience is different. Ever since the 2024 U.S. election, together with Ia Parulava, I have been correcting the disinformation spread by these programs and these leaders, with facts. The result: more than a hundred politicians, journalists, and NGO representatives blocked me — among them the very leaders already named in this article. Some had agreed with me in private conversation the day before — and repeated the same thing on air the next day.

Whoever agrees with you in private and continues the opposite in public is not lacking information. He has made a decision.

What Happens Beneath the Noise
While the airwaves curse Trump, the transactions move quietly.

An investigation published by iFact, first reported by Reuters, lays out what it presents as the mechanism behind the MEGOBARI Act's delay in the Senate: Georgia's state oil and gas corporation wrote off from its balance sheet an arbitration debt of 15.5 million lari — over 5.5 million dollars — owed by Frontera, the company of Texas oil magnate Steve Nicandros; the financial statements state directly that "there is no point in demanding this sum." After that, according to iFact, Nicandros wrote letters to as many as sixteen senators whose campaigns he had financed over the years: do not obstruct the act, it will damage my future investment. The "investment" — a hundred million dollars over two years — does not, by the investigation's conclusion, actually exist. Six years ago the same Nicandros called Ivanishvili "an oligarch of the Russian school, caught in Putin's pincers." Today he is cast as the guarantor that the act will never pass. iFact approached every party for comment. No one replied.

For accuracy's sake — and it matters: the MEGOBARI Act is neither dead nor blocked. It passed the House and now sits before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the Senate, "blocking" a bill is not an official act. A "hold" is an informal, unrecorded signal to leadership — nothing anyone can point to, produce, or confirm. The bill has not been voted down. It has not been withdrawn. It does not expire until the current Congress ends, after the November elections — it is alive. The "finally blocked," "shelved for good" sensation the Georgian airwaves broadcast describes a procedural event that, officially, does not exist — and that no one can produce.

iFact called it what it was: a political barter. The ruling party escaped American sanctions; the Texas company shed its liabilities and — by iFact's own account — entities tied to its management picked up fresh benefits and exclusive extraction rights in Kakheti. Note who put that on the record: iFact, an outlet repeatedly funded by Open Society Foundation grants. Even inside the ecosystem the opposition trusts, the barter is documented in black and white.

Now watch what happened when that same investigation went out on Georgian television. On Formula, it opened like this: behind this process stand the personal interests of two men and a multimillion-dollar deal. Two men — a Texas oilman and Trump's sitting cabinet secretary. The broadcast turns on those two American names. The written-off fifteen million is mentioned — but the man whose company benefits from that write-off, who for years represented that company before the Georgian government, Frontera's Georgian chief executive Zaza Mamulashvili, is not named once. Frontera is instead described on air as "Mullin's company."

One investigation. Two audiences. Two lessons. In English: a political barter in which Ivanishvili's government is the buyer. In Georgian, in prime time: America is for sale. The Georgian viewer leaves the broadcast with a single conclusion — Republican senators, congressmen, and the president are corrupt.

A barter, by definition, has two sides. On air, one name is missing. It is the Georgian one.

In parallel, a Trump Tower is rising in Tbilisi. The Wall Street Journal first reported the project in April 2026: a 70-story tower, the tallest in the Caucasus, built by a consortium of Georgian firms alongside the New York-based Sapir Organization, an old partner of the Trump Organization. And the land it will stand on, according to Georgian Business Media, is still registered to the Cartu Foundation — Ivanishvili's.

Look at the construction. Ivanishvili's system buys Republican influence quietly — with written-off debts and skyscrapers. The opposition media curses those same Republicans loudly — from broadcast to broadcast. One buys, the other burns. Both lines work toward the same end: the bridge between America and the Georgian people must be brought down.

The Intermediary
There is a third line — the quietest. It has a face, but it will have no name in this article.

Last autumn, a woman contacted Ia Parulava from Washington through a mutual acquaintance. She insisted on a meeting — necessarily at Ia's home. She flew in to Tbilisi. In the very first conversation she said that her inner circle is connected to Vice President Vance — and showed Ia, on her phone, a screenshot of a friend's message containing a purported line from Vance: there is no one in Georgia America can rely on. She praised Ia's work. She asked for English-language video messages "for friends in Washington." One such request is worth recalling in detail: first she asked why Ia had brought Eric Trump's new book Under Siege onto the country's most popular comedy show — and then asked her to record a video, in English, explaining it, because "my friends in Washington didn't understand this" and she wanted the video for them. She promised petition signatures, broadcasts, meetings with senators, an introduction to Gavin Newsom — "the future president." She explained that Republican senators' offices are in fact staffed by Democrats who carry information in and out so that the senators never even notice. And step by step, from meeting to meeting, she steered the conversation in a single direction: that Ia should give up debunking the disinformation about Trump.

That TV Pirveli broadcast — with the QR-code episode — was arranged by her as well.

Decades spent in the special services teach one thing: recognizing the pattern of an approach. Approach through an intermediary. A meeting at the home. Flattery. A blur of high names. A small request. A large promise. And, at the end, the real objective. This pattern is familiar to me.

That is why I advised Ia to accept the contact. Observation is sometimes the best answer. Ia Parulava is ready to confirm all of it — with correspondence, photographs, documents — to any interested American agency.

The Price
This work has a price, and Ia is paying it. The MEGOBARI Act brochures, the animated films, the petition, the video clips — she produced and printed all of it out of her own pocket. It was precisely while handing out those brochures that the patrol police fined her 5,000 lari. Two court cases, "lost" one after another. And the wave that branded her an "organizer of violent protests" — Ia recorded it before a notary and took it to court. "Sent" people who warned her to abandon this work. Family members turned against her.

And two episodes in one place — at the American Embassy itself. Last year she was no longer invited to the Independence Day reception — a woman who had always been invited over the years, and who carries the American flag in this country. The invitation arrived only after my intervention. This year, at the reception marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, by Ia's own account — spoken publicly on her social media — insults against the sitting president could be heard loudly and shamelessly on the Embassy grounds, at an American celebration, from guests. And when Ia, greeting the Chargé d'Affaires, told him she was a Trump supporter, the smile left his face.

The Quote That Explains Everything
When the fractured opposition was cursing itself, we offered them something simple: unite around the MEGOBARI Act. I spoke to the leaders from here, in America; Ia met them in Tbilisi, in her own home. A union of eight parties looked all but settled. The result: zero.

In one of the last conversations, opposition leaders told Ia directly what people usually do not say out loud: if America removes Bidzina Ivanishvili's regime, America will have no choice but us — we will staff the government. So we will not allow new parties and civic activists to appear. And if Ivanishvili stays — we feel fine as it is. Why should we ache over a head that doesn't hurt?

Read that again. Ivanishvili needs a useless opposition — it is his legitimacy. The opposition needs an eternal Ivanishvili — it is its profession. The circle is closed. The Georgian people pay the bill.

This circle has its symbol, too. Salome Zurabishvili became president through the 2018 election — formally an "independent" candidate, in reality Ivanishvili's pick. The "independence" was precisely the device that presented his own candidate as a "neutral" figure outside the party. Her campaign was financed by Ivanishvili's family; Ivanishvili himself — unlike the previous election — took part personally.

How he chose her, Zurabishvili tells herself. In June 2026, on TV Pirveli, she described it: they were at the opera, Ivanishvili came over and asked — "Do you still want the presidency?" "I thought about it, and — why not?" After that, by her own account, there was never a one-on-one conversation about what kind of president she meant to be. "He went and put my candidacy to the party," she says, "when the party was in fact against it." That interview, incidentally, was spread by Mtavari.

One question, asked at one opera. No program, no positions, no vision. And still — president.

There was one other qualification. During that same 2018 campaign, Zurabishvili said publicly that Georgia had started the 2008 war — that Georgia had followed Russia's provocation. That is the Kremlin's oldest claim about that war, repeated for a decade by Russia's foreign ministry and its state broadcasters, and Russian media amplified her words the moment she spoke them. The backlash at home was immediate. Weeks later she corrected herself: Russia is the aggressor, Russia is the occupier, Russia started the war.

Two statements. One campaign. Two registers. By now the pattern should be familiar.

And that election was accompanied by allegations documented by Transparency International, ISFED, and GYLA: by a whistleblower's account, a scheme to print false ID cards at a state agency, and, days before the runoff, the write-off — through Ivanishvili's family "Kartu" foundation — of the bank debts of more than 600,000 people, which those same organizations assessed as vote-buying. Today the same Zurabishvili is presented to us as a leader of the opposition. For whom such an opposition is convenient — the reader will work out for himself.

Emigration
This lesson does not stay within borders. The Georgian diaspora lives physically in America — but informationally in Tbilisi. Every evening, from the Georgian airwaves and Georgian Facebook, it learns that the country it lives in is the enemy. In the Georgian émigré community where I live and work, hostility to the sitting U.S. administration is not the exception; it is the ambient noise.

But there is a second picture. When our campaign began — brochures, animations, a petition, because neither government nor opposition media would cover the MEGOBARI Act — the American flag was nowhere to be seen at the opposition's demonstrations. Nor did they want it there. On the contrary — at those same demonstrations, America was cursed out loud. It was then that Ia Parulava bought American flags at her own expense and appeared with them in the street. Alone. Then we — I from here, Ia in Tbilisi — organized, more than once, large marches and demonstrations in the streets of Tbilisi in support of America. A year later, an acquaintance wrote to Ia from that same demonstration: today there were many American flags, they even played the American anthem. What you were saying a year ago, they finally heard. And by the Enguri River — the line that divides Georgia from Russian-occupied Abkhazia — someone carved into a field, in two-meter letters: MEGOBARI Act.

The people have not forgotten their love for America. The people are being taught to hate it.

And the teaching leaves a mark you can measure. In NDI's polling, Georgians name the European Union as their closest desired partner far more often than the United States — 60 percent to 38 percent in politics, 59 percent to 34 percent in the economy. That gap is not destiny. It is what happens when one half of the Western alliance is cursed nightly and the other is held up as the alternative: the government calls America the enemy, the opposition calls this America the enemy, and both point to Europe. Curse one partner every evening and celebrate the other, and the numbers move. They have moved.

What Washington Can Actually Do
A diagnosis without a remedy is just complaining. The remedy is simple and cheap.

Into Georgia's information space, America enters today through a single filter: translations of CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post — citations of the very media at war with the sitting administration. The Georgian viewer learns about America only from the Americans who hate this administration. The alternative — Newsmax, the New York Post, Fox News — simply does not exist in the Georgian space. The State Department and the Embassy in Tbilisi can change that: translation, content partnership, access. And one more thing: see, and support, the civic groups waging this fight out of their own pockets and off their own backs. They are few. But it was precisely they who brought the American flag back to Rustaveli.

Finale
Two dynamics. One lesson. The government says: America is the enemy. The opposition says: this America is the enemy. Half of Ivanishvili's work the opposition did for free — willingly or not, the reader will decide.

To the opposition-minded reader I want to say one thing directly: you are being attacked from three directions — Ivanishvili, Russia, and the ecosystem that breathes hatred of Trump and whose instructions part of your leadership trusts blindly. For such leaders the political lexicon has an old term: "useful idiots." Wake up — or you will pay the bill again.

And in the middle stands a people who named a street after an American president, sent their own children to America's wars, and still look toward America — while from both dynamics they hear the same thing: you look in vain.

It is not in vain.

Georgians do not need to be persuaded to love America. They did that on their own, for a generation. They need only to hear it speak for itself.

America has to raise its voice — in its own voice, without interpreters.

Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008 he served as a senior official across Georgia's Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work appears in Newsweek, The Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, and RealClearWorld, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.