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As usual, the more we learn about Russia’s interference we realize it’s even worse than we previously thought. This goes for what we now know after the Senate Intelligence Committee released a new report that analyzes the extent of Russian social media disinformation on behalf of  Donald Trump.

“The Russians aimed particular energy at activating conservatives on issues such as gun rights and immigration, while sapping the political clout of left-leaning African American voters by undermining their faith in elections and spreading misleading information about how to vote. Many other groups — Latinos, Muslims, Christians, gay men and women, liberals, Southerners, veterans — got at least some attention from Russians operating thousands of social media accounts.”

“The second report — prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee by researchers for New Knowledge, Columbia University and Canfield Research — emphasized this aspect of the Russian operation, saying, “The IRA created an expansive cross-platform media mirage targeting the Black community, which shared and cross-promoted authentic Black media to create an immersive influence ecosystem.”

Exactly-remember what Trump’s digital manager said-we have three different voter suppression operations going on (Chapter A).

Because the Democratic base is bigger than the GOP base, a big part of the GOP ‘ground game’ is to stop Democrats from voting.

Paul Waldman:

“Depressing African American turnout was plainly a top priority for Russian intelligence. In other words, their efforts offered a short-term reinforcement of one of the core elements of the Republican Party’s long-term electoral strategy. The GOP tries to erect barriers to registration and voting that fall particularly hard on African Americans, and then the Russians sweep in to tell those same voters that they shouldn’t bother even trying to go to the polls, because it won’t make a difference anyway.”

This is clear in the second report that the Intelligence Committee commissioned from a cybersecurity firm called New Knowledge. Nicholas Thompson and Issie Lapowsky of Wired explain:

Among more than a dozen web domains the IRA registered, the vast majority, including DoNotShoot.us and Blacktivist.info, were aimed at black communities. Of the 33 most popular Facebook pages linked to the IRA, nearly half focused on black audiences. This effort was particularly successful on Instagram, where the account @blackstagram, amassed more than 300,000 followers and elicited more than 28 million reactions. Much of this content seemed designed to stoke distrust among black Americans in democratic institutions and depress black turnout for Hillary Clinton.

Whether or not the Russian officials managing this effort were in direct communication with the Trump campaign, they were certainly trying to push the same buttons. Let me refer you to this October 2016 article in which Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg got unusual inside access to the Trump campaign’s digital strategy:

“Instead of expanding the electorate, [Steve] Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. ‘We have three major voter suppression operations under way,’ says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.” […]

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as [Brad] Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

So Russia picked up on one of the most despicable — and effective — parts of the GOP strategy, understanding where its help was needed and where it could have an impact.

https://twitter.com/Sifill_LDF/status/1074663476239446016

Yet it seems that even someone like Jason Johnson minimized it after the report came out:

Johnson seemed to be saying ‘Yeah this happened but it’s only because Clinton was such a bad candidate that it had any effect, if it had been Biden or Beato it wouldn’t have worked.’

This is all about the selective way Biden has been talked about since he was put into the role as Hillary’s foil-because she and not he was the presumed frontrunner in 2016-back in 2011-2012 she was his foil; whoever the actual Democrat is the media decides is a ‘very flawed candidate’.

It’s as if no one remembers his prior reputation as a ‘gaffe machine’ and while Johnson suggested that Clinton would have fallen short with the Black vote no matter what Russia did-because she used the term ‘super-predator’ 22 years ago he seems to have forgotten/not known about-I presume the former-the fact that Biden once voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, oversaw the Anita Hill fiasco, supported that terrible bill for the credit card companies-and by the way, also voted for Iraq.

It’s certainly clear that the Bernie Left would have opposed him at least as vociferously had he actually ran-as he was just as much part of the ‘establishment’ as she was. And if Clinton’s use of ‘super-predators’ somehow showed the true window into her soul then what does the way Biden treated Anita Hill show about his soul? 

UPDATE: Interestingly Nate Silver had a subsequent piece that documented that about 25% of Bernie voters less supported(Heart)Bern than hated Clinton-aka Never Hillary voters-and were actually more conservative than the median Democrat.

And the reality is that Biden lost twice-and did much worse than Hillary did-and then there’s his plagiarism from 1988… Now it’s possible his association with Obama might change that some, but nevertheless…

But the reason why Johnson and many others even now try to minimize the impact of Russian interference-again, Trump won by 77,000 votes, so to claim Russian interference didn’t matter you have to argue more than that it had only a small effect, you have to make the heroic assumption that it had no effect-I think was underscored by the experience of Scott Stedman-who despite being just 22 has already been part of some major scoops on Russiagate-he’s done some joint reporting with Natasha Bertrand, etc.

No doubt, this already makes him a target of the Trump Deplorables on Twitter. But he got a huge amount of death threats for this tweet.:

Yes, besides African-Americans, the Russian effort also focused on millennial Bernie supporters-and it turns out Stedman was one of them. But the response to this seemingly innocuous tweet is telling.

But why did precisely this tweet of his lead to all those death threats? Because he was willing to admit that maybe he was influenced by the Russian propaganda effort. To admit that the very idea is logically possible outraged all the Clinton haters on the Left and Right who like to pretend they are incapable of being influenced in any way.

They hate Clinton because she’s ‘so hatable’ not because they are just feeble minded dolts who are just very easy to influence. Indeed, so much of my own feeling of what I will insist is a righteous rage over what happened in 2016 is inspired by just how absurdly impressionable and easily influenced so many are. It’s like high school where you sit next to someone at lunch everyday and then some other people start rumors about this person and then you start pretending you hate them too. This is the mindset of many.  Sorry but we all hate Hillary because we’ve been convinced by the GOP and MSM that’s just what decent people do.

I mean when the MSM goes on about how allegedly ‘unlikeable’ Clinton is, they are literally mimicking the words of despicable Republican smear merchants like Edward Klein. 

It’s very similar to the narrative behind hating Nancy Pelosi-indeed, the GOPers behind that will tell you today they attacked her because she is so effective. Yet, you get sad sack ‘liberals’ and ‘Democrats’ who now mimic these same talking points without being honest about where they got it. In 2016, you even had pathetic Berners celebrating Rush Limbaugh’s jokes about Chelsea Clinton’s appearance.

Just tell the truth: we hate Nancy Pelosi-Hillary Clinton-Kamala Harris-because Trump and the GOP told us to. Get us Democratic leaders who the GOP will like and approve of. 

Stedman is one of the few willing to actually admit he may have been duped. And this explains the death threats.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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