Ultimately though, this is dependent upon Americans being imbeciles.
Unfortunately, there were a lot of imbeciles.
One thing you can always bank on, sadly.
Write [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] to support Elizabeth Warren’s request for an audit of Trump’s financials.
The same stuff has been going on around the world in the last year or two.
The genius of this is it targeted Democrats that were tuned into news media and social media to make them disaffected enough to get them to stay home, but not skeptical enough to question who was leaking this and why. (Or even whether it mattered.)
I still find it hard to believe that pro-Trump memes did much. It’s not like Rust Belt whites that flipped to Trump were sitting around waiting for the next Pepe image macro from Russia. I doubt they even know who John Podesta is.
Fake news is an issue, but it’s not like Russia is directing a decentralized global problem like that.
Human brains are just not adapted to handling hundreds of sources that appear independent all lying, saying things that they do not in fact believe-- but that is what the network of bots and shills on social media make possible. It’s like a DDOS attack on the brain. We can filter one or two sources saying crazy things, but when a crowd of people seem to share a belief, it is much more convincing. It happens subconsciously.
Some human brains do better than others… just saying.
It just requires that people have critical thinking skills.
I don’t think that’s enough. When lots of people who tend to express opinions you agree with also agree that something is true (or at least, share stories that say that thing is true), it takes not just critical thinking, but a vigilant, critical approach to all news and the time to actually investigate the truth. Most people have neither of those things, even if they are able to think critically when they realize they should.
Pro-Trump memes weren’t about changing people’s votes from Hillary to Trump, they were about making sure people wavering stayed with Trump. In a nutshell:
- Trump does something ridiculous that would kill any normal candidates campaign.
- The media and Democrats blast him on it, things look dire for the Trump Campaign.
- Trump supporters on the edge begin to waver…
- Trump surrogates and pro-Trump media begin hand waving and gaslighting the issue.
- Pro-Trump memes circulate widely, making it seem like the issue is nothing, lies or that Hillary has done much worse, usually all three.
- Trump supporters on the edge are calmed, return to the fold.
So yeah, the memes may not have convinced someone to switch to Trump all on their own, but the unprecedented volume of such content throughout the election cycle most certainly helped Trump’s campaign weather a veritable shitstorm of fuck ups that would have eroded the confidence of any previous candidate’s base. When pundits were asking how Trump’s campaign survived so many critical failures, it was the memes and other social media reinforcing the ridiculous stream of lunacy coming from his surrogates and making the base believe it as facts.
I don’t think Russia is to blame for memes, but I do suspect they were heavily involved in the hacks of the Podesta emails, the DNC and the RNC, and I believe that they colluded with Wikileaks and other sources to manipulate the release of information, some of it fake, to influence public and media reactions during the election cycle.
Bottom line for me : The U.S. Intelligence community says there’s something to these claims. If there is no investigation, especially after the FBI - Clinton email fiasco, then we know Trump’s Administration is corrupt as hell. I don’t expect that the election results would be invalidated, Clinton is done, Trump is President, but I do expect that should Russian involvement be discovered and traced back to anyone in Trump’s circle, he would be impeached and Pence would have to take over. Hell, I’d go one further and say Pence would also be tainted and tossed, and we’d be listening to President Ryan give the resulting State of the Union Address.
So Obama has asked for a full investigation to be concluded before he leaves office. The question is: what is he going to do with that information? Does he want it complete simply so that he can release it to the public to force an impeachment (assuming it found evidence of Trump’s illegitimacy) or to legitimize the Trump administration (if it concluded there wasn’t any significant tampering)? Once the Electoral College votes, the matter is settled, so it’s not like we can undo it at that point. I guess maybe he also wants to know if he should launch an attack against Russia to overthrow Putin before he leaves office? It seems pretty difficult for him to do anything major, though, if Trump would oppose it.
Correction: Anonymous sources claims through “leaks” to the “press” that there is something to this, which may or may not help democrats shift blame from themselves to “the other” for the election result.
Maybe we need Powell to do another PowerPoint presentation in the UN.
Correction: the White House, Senators on both sides of the aisle, and anonymous sources of mainstream press say that there is something to this. But sure, everyone who does anything Trump doesn’t like is just a political partisan playing politics and therefore not really credible.
I don’t think he wants to force an impeachment, but if he doesn’t do this, it seems likely Trump and his cronies will do everything in their power to destroy/bury anything that even hints of this (ala, give me the names of everyone who worked on climate change).
Obama needs to do this, because you can surely bet Trump won’t.
They don’t need to shift anything. The blame is on the shoulders of Trump, the GOP and anyone who supported them. If the Russians were involved, I can’t imagine anyone who is okay with that and thinks they can still call them patriotic on any level. If anyone within the US helped the Russians, that’s treason, or at least it should be.
Correction to your correction: The actual CIA, you know, a U.S. Intelligence Agency, released a report back in October, before the election, that they believed Russia to be behind the hacks of the DNC, RNC and Podesta. Now, in December, after the election, the CIA has had more time to analyze the data and have concluded that the folks who conducted these hacks released information obtained from the DNC and Podesta hacks, but NOT from the RNC hack. That has led them to suspect the hackers may have been working towards influencing the election.
But by all means, please tell me how CNN is a corrupt and lying mainstream media outlet far less trustworthy than Brietbart, or how Trump, who has attended exactly THREE briefings thus far as President elect, knows more about this than the intelligence community and congressional committee members whose briefings he hasn’t deemed important enough to attend.
Did Donald Trump collude with the Russians to win the election. No, most likely not. Did the Russians attempt to influence the American people to sway the outcome of the election? It’s looking increasingly more likely.
Ah, no, there’s more to that. The intelligence community has stated, officially, that Russia was behind the hacks. This happened months ago.
Only this most recent story at the WaPo was annonymously sourced.
Studies have shown that only 5% of high school graduates are critical thinkers. Off the top of my head the other percentages are: 20% relative thinkers and 75% dualists. I’ll look for sources this afternoon if I have time. The basic point is that 95% of the American public are not critical thinkers.
There is an intelligence consensus (that’s not anonymous leaks, btw, that’s a report from the DNI) that Russia hacked election-related organizations and engaged in various propaganda activities to interfere with the election.
The stuff where there is lack of consensus/anonymous leaks is whether the Russians were doing it for lulz or specifically to get Trump elected–which is rumored to be the CIA view.
Something a lot of skeptics seem to overlook is that FBI and CIA have non-technical ways to assign responsibility for the hacks; they don’t have to rely solely on computer forensics. In fact it seems likely that the CIA knows everyone who had access to the DNC/Podesta emails before Wikileaks released them.
Now…
could it be possible that if the Trump administration had direct contact with the Kremlin, who spent Russian resources to effect the election.
Could this be treason?