Important article by Heather Cox Richardson. You can find the original at this link.
The important news today was a very public fight between candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Tulsi Gabbard and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but the story is not important because it says anything about the Democratic presidential candidates for 2020. It is important because it is a textbook example of precisely what the Senate Intelligence Committee warned about in their October 8 report on Russia's use of social media to undermine American democracy.
In an interview with David Plouffe, an Obama advisor, Clinton said "I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.... She's the favorite of the Russians." Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic Representative from Hawaii running for president, immediately tweeted back: "You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain." Social media has buzzed ever since.
But while Gabbard tweeted at Clinton, “It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me," that's not clear at all. Gabbard is polling at 1%, which means her candidacy is dead in the water. Clinton is not running, and she didn't mention anyone by name (which is a long-honored tradition in American politics for avoiding conflicts when discussing colleagues with whom one has issues), so no harm, no foul. In normal times, this "controversy" would be a non-story.
But somehow this extraordinary non-story is getting way more oxygen than the fact that today top officials in the Department of Housing and Urban Development admitted they broke the law to withhold money from Puerto Rico intended to help it rebuild after Hurricane Maria. It is getting more oxygen than the fact that outgoing Energy Secretary Rick Perry is ignoring a congressional subpoena for documents about the Ukraine scandal because he considers the impeachment illegitimate.
Those two stories are huge: both signal an administration breaking laws, and in normal times would likely sink a presidency, or at least swamp it.
So what's going on? On October 8, the Senate Intelligence Committee released an 86-page document about Russian interference in the 2016 election. This investigation ran alongside the Mueller Investigation, and was overseen by committee chair Richard Burr, a Republican. The committee concluded that Russian organization called the Internet Research Agency (IRA) flooded American social media with commentary before the 2016 election. The IRA is run by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch close to Putin, and the committee concluded the IRA's actions are sanctioned by the Kremlin.
The IRA worked to elect Donald Trump. It pushed Americans to support Trump, or Bernie Sanders or other third-party candidates, and constantly undercut Hillary Clinton, claiming she was sick, anti-Black, or a war-monger. While the committee found no indication that Sanders or Stein were aware that IRA was pushing their candidacies, they did find evidence that Trump people worked with the IRA in some cases. This highlights the difference between being a Russian agent, meaning you are knowingly advancing Russian interests, and being a Russian asset, which means you are helpful to them whether or not you mean to, or want to, be.
The committee report also said that the key tool in the IRA's kit was to exploit tensions in American society to drive Americans apart. Even more than turning us against each other, though, their plan was to undermine voters' belief in news of any sort. The IRA threw stories at the US like a firehose through the use of bots-- automated accounts that retweeted and reposted stories-- or with trolls-- real people hired to appear to be Americans as they posted on news sites and interacted with other commenters. These fake accounts advanced stories and memes that helped Trump and hurt Clinton by pushing false stories from both far right and far left positions. As voters tried to figure out what was real and what wasn't, good people gave up, concluding that everyone was corrupt, everything was too complicated to figure out, and American political debate was too toxic to tolerate. They withdrew.
The Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that the IRA did not stop after 2016. Instead, it ramped up its activities. Their goal is to keep Americans arguing and confused, despite the fact that polls show that we are overwhelmingly in agreement with each other on even hot button issues like abortion, gun rights, and taxation. As bots and trolls push extreme positions, the news skews. So, for example, today we have a manufactured fight between two non-candidates, rather than a focus on the ethnic cleansing of our former allies in Syria, apparently suffering from war crimes like the use of chemical weapons.
In addition to the Gabbard/Clinton story, you could see, over the past 24 hours, a bizarre skewing of the story of Hillary Clinton's emails, and I, anyway, saw first-hand how convincing the bots and trolls can be. I read the State Department report on the investigation when it came out, and it was unequivocal: "Instances of classified information being deliberately transmitted via unclassified email were the rare exception and resulted in adjudicated security violations. There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information." Further, while there were minor violations of handling material, none of that material was classified.
But after I wrote about the report last night, this page was swamped with comments saying I was a Democratic apologist and highlighting the violations (which the report said were just business-as-usual). By midmorning, major newspapers were leading with the violations rather than the exoneration. By mid-afternoon, I was mortified, assuming that I had been so tired last night I had misread the document. So I called it back up (it is quite hard to find, by the way) and reread it. I had been right the first time (and will put it in the notes so you can see it for yourself). Even though I knew what was in the original document, pressure from bots and trolls, and then media stories from people probably under similar pressure, made me doubt what I had read with my own eyes.
That is what we are up against in America today. The goal is not simply to get us to support one candidate or another, although that is undoubtedly part of it. The goal is to get us to lose faith in any news at all, thinking it is all skewed and there is nothing left to believe in. At that point, we will accept the rule of anyone who promises clarity.
This is an attack not just on American democracy, but on the very concept that formed this nation, the Enlightenment concept that, given access to factual information, human beings can devise a government that will enable them to rule themselves, rather than to be ruled by a few rich men.
We are at war, but fortunately is a war in which it is remarkably easy to take up arms. You simply need to question what you hear and read, demand evidence, think for yourself... and ignore the trolls.