Ru$$ophobia Must Never Die

The New York Times and Washington Post and other corporate media outlets are all pushing new documents today pushing the same old Russiagate propaganda.

The reports, contracted by the "bipartisan" Senate Intelligence Committee, seem designed to both shame "Russian-targeted" Black voters who failed to turn out for Hillary Clinton and thus unwittingly gave the 2016 election to Donald Trump, and to gaslight supporters of Bernie Sanders, who remains the most popular politician in America and who threatens Joe Biden and others of the neoliberal persuasion as they vie for the next Democratic presidential nomination.

The Times piece, written by Scott Shane and Sheera Frenkel, uncritically highlights the findings of an Austin, TX-based "brand defense" start-up called New Knowledge. This organization says it discovered that the indicted Russian troll farm, Internet Research Agency, which meddled in our free and fair elections process, was even more evil than they first told us to believe. They produced a lot more cheesy ads on a lot more social media platforms than were immediately apparent when Russiagate first became a "thing" more than a year ago. The ads were just discovered to have been specifically aimed at Black voters and at Bernie supporters. Although there is no proof that the ads actually swung the election to Trump, that possibility exists, says the Times. They will never know. And neither will you.

Sow the doubt, and sow it good and hard. Because doubt and confusion are prerequisites of fear. And fear is essential to compliance.

Meanwhile, a quick visit to the New Knowledge website tells you what the Times doesn't bother disclosing:  it was founded and is run by former (and who knows, maybe even current) employees of, and advisers to, the US military, the NSA and the State Department.

My published comment on the "blockbuster" story:

This article doesn't inform readers that the co-founder and chief operating officer of New Knowledge, contracted to write the report on Russian influence, spent 15 years at the NSA working on SIGINT and has also served in US Army's Joint Special Ops.

 https://www.newknowledge.com/our-company

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/01/nsa-global-surveillance-sigint-seniors/

 It's always a good idea to investigate the sources of one's information, both in cheesy, amateurish Facebook and Instagram ads, and in highly respected mainstream media outlets.

This article also serves the subtle purpose of denigrating the popular Bernie Sanders, at whose supporters the ads were directed. If you didn't vote for Hillary, if you voted for Jill Stein, and if you simply voted for nobody at all, and if you are still a Bernie fan, it is possible (but of course not provable as the article hastens to add) that the Russians infiltrated your brain. And the Russian trolls are even snidely joking about it in their subsequent ads!

Solutions? Quit Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and agitate for more public education funding, specifically teaching kids basic civics and critical thinking to help them identify propaganda, whatever the source. And pay teachers a living wage so that more people will enter this important and undervalued profession.

And reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, which mandated broadcasting in the public interest. Here's looking at the biggest disinformation troll of all: Fox News.

 The Times article also doesn't disclose that the author of the New Knowledge report, Renee DiResta, is a venture capitalist and derivatives trader in a parallel professional life. This presumably gives her the expertise to declare that while "very real racial tensions and feelings of alienation have existed in the United States for decades," the Russians make them worse by exploiting them. After all, she sunk some her own money into the New Knowledge startup.

New Knowledge actually gets its funding from several venture capital firms, including GGV Capital, Moonshot Capital, Haystack Ventures, Geekdom Fund, Capital Factory and Spitfire Ventures. 

Nowhere in the New York Times piece is the question asked why Ryan Fox, the NSA veteran and special ops spook running New Knowledge, didn't come up with the goods on Russian meddling a long time ago, when he was developing all that advanced global eavesdropping technology and defending our precious national security interests. Maybe, and quite probably, he did. And he and the other spy state operatives dismissed it out of hand as being too trivial and commonplace to even worry about.

Then Hillary lost, and her campaign operatives needed to come up with a big excuse in a big hurry. Enter the good folks in the public-private Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex and some old intel gathering dust in the cyberfiles of the NSA and its various partners.

And so it's time once again to cast doubt in the minds of people who still support Bernie Sanders or who otherwise champion progressive and socialist ideas. The Times article does it, none too subtly, with this paragraph:

Of 81 Facebook pages created by the Internet Research Agency in the Senate’s data, 30 targeted African-American audiences, amassing 1.2 million followers, the report finds. By comparison, 25 pages targeted the political right and drew 1.4 million followers. Just seven pages focused on the political left, drawing 689,045 followers.
While the right-wing pages promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the left-wing pages scorned Mrs. Clinton while promoting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The voter suppression effort was focused particularly on Sanders supporters and African-Americans, urging them to shun Mrs. Clinton in the general election and either vote for Ms. Stein or stay home.
Whether such efforts had a significant effect is difficult to judge. Black voter turnout declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, but it is impossible to determine whether that was the result of the Russian campaign.

The spooks and private equity capitalists at New Knowledge, meanwhile, want you to discard your previous knowledge, and just trust the predatory lords of capitalism to divide the good discourse from the bad. Without a hint of irony, given the security state's current vendetta against truth-revealing whistleblowers like Ed Snowden and Julian Assange, its mission statement asserts:  

 We are living in a crisis of trust - and societies in which citizens can’t trust their information sources are vulnerable to collapse. It’s no secret that in today’s information-rich society, the lines between fact and fiction have blurred. 
New Knowledge is on a mission to make it easier to monitor and defend against damaging social media security risks and disinformation so the truth will prevail in our public discourse.

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Meanwhile, try very hard to censor your own independent thoughts, while they go about monitoring your online activities and censoring any information that might hurt their profits and damage their waning credibility.