Probably a scam, but congrats on discovering the Russian disinformation strategy from 2016.
the Russian disinformation strategy
I’ll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
If you asked who owns and operates the FOX News Channel, or Sinclair Media, or Clear Channel Radio, or any of the other dozen right-wing propaganda projects, I have to wonder how many people would reflexively insist “Russia” despite all of the money spilling in from the UK, Australia, Canada, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the O&G Industry.
I’ll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Maybe because there was a demonstrated and provable coordinated effort by the Russian government in the 2016 election to get Trump elected? Look up project lakhta. Russian election interference and the efforts of the domestic conservative movement can (and do) exist simultaneously.
What do you have against attributing actions to the Russian government that are demonstrably attributable to the Russian government?
I’ll be real, I have my suspicions regarding that whole scandal in 2016 because following the election there were like 2-3 days of quiet introspection by the Dems and then they aligned on “the Russians were pushing fake news that tricked everyone!”
My pet conspiracy theory is that it was already known within the political campaigns that these misinformation campaigns were happening and they chose to at that point publicize them and use that as their scapegoat. Same with the Russian spies they publicly outed that trump spoke with.
Because there have been literal articles and reports by the FBI that Russian interference in social media has been a thing since the 2016 election cycle.
That’s why it’s been attributed to the Russian government. Because the Russian government actually did a ton of stuff.
They were at it at least a year before the 2016 election cycle. I believe it was the CIA that said Russia was the one that created the Jade Helm scare in 2015 through social media influence.
Jade Helm was the name of a training operation of the US military in central TX near Temple. The Russians created a bunch of posts claiming that Obama was taking over local Walmarts and emptying them of all merchandise to use as prisoners for his political opponents. They even drew diagrams of the insides of the stores with the holding cells and everything. So great was the Russian influence that Abbott (who is still Governor of TX) ordered the TX National Guard to watch the training exercise and make sure that the US military wasn’t storming homes and taking prisoners.
there have been literal articles and reports by the FBI that Russian interference
There have been literal articles and reports by the FBI of domestic white nationalist organizing and domestic financing. Significantly more money and manpower is documented as entirely domestically organized, although a sizeable amount is moving between NATO and other Five Eyes states. We’re talking on the scale of tens of billions moving between domestic financiers - like the Mercers, Thiel, the Kochs, etc - and domestic fascist media/organizing. That dwarfs Russian state interventions. Its orders of magnitude different.
That’s why it’s been attributed to the Russian government.
Why do you search for the speck in your neighbor’s eye when you have a plank within your own?
Not exactly a scam. I still browse Reddit, and the Jordan Peterson Memes sub has been popping up in Popular for a few weeks, it had been a completely obscure sub before. The posts are ALL about US politics too…on a meme sub for a Canadian ‘life coach’
That’s because Jordan Peterson is one of the entry points to the alt-right rabbit hole. Despite being from Canada, his brand of grift is intricately tied to U.S. politics. If you have a very short amount of time, some people have put together some very short videos talking about Peterson:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIK-x5uT6oS9EnO9-D6ePsWKOxtFhDZdF
Ender’s Game was prescient text, regardless of Orson Scott Card’s personal beliefs.
Locke and Demosthenes are now armies of manipulative bots (but often real humans), shaping political discourse throughout the world. The Internet gave mind control powers to people with money, ambition, or both. We saw it with the Bernie Sanders and Trump movements in 2016 on Reddit, all too clearly for those who lived through an era where bullshit detection was a critical skill.
I was once fairly defeatist on this subject: the bad guys won, got Trump elected, and kicked off a new era of 80s conservatism that demonized progressive values like environmental conservation, freedom of choice in a number of matters, and equality.
But now, I’m starting to see young people stand up to their boomer relatives at Thanksgiving and bring facts and logic to social media discussions. And I have regained some hope that we will once again find a way to make the progressive “line go up“. Our society seems to swing like a pendulum between the right and left, over decades, and it feels like the Trump era was a swing too violent for most of us. It’s time to swing back.
