Yes, America, the Russians have been actively interfering in this year’s presidential election in support of Trump’s re-election. It is not a question of “will they” but instead, “have they” and the answer to that is a resounding “yes.” Moreover, they’ve been quite successful so far.
That is, we should not be looking to election day to watch out for this Russian interference. As was the case in 2016, the Russian intervention took the form of a lot of mischief leading up to the election in the area of messing with the voting electorate itself. Countless Russian “bots” flooded the U.S. social media with psychologically-astute forms of mental manipulation.
The social media campaigns may have appeared crude and ham-handed, but there was a huge amount of highly professional, historically-tested “mind bending” methods in play to craft them. This great adversary of democracy has drawn on a wealth of tested knowledge and techniques developed by the defenders of autocratic force against democratic impulses since the time of the American revolution. The smartest of those leading such efforts have recognized that sheer brute force can go only so far in repressing popular uprisings. Instead, sophisticated techniques to execute the simple concept but difficult to effect “divide and conquer” interventions into a mass population are also required.
Volumes can be said and documented about how this has been carried out over the last couple centuries. In the shortest of shorthands, when a clash between a ruling class and its subjects breaks out, and a third interest, an element of generally nihilistic and violent anarchists, dives into the fray, they do so as tools of the ruling group.
Anarchists, whose flag is not red but black, have messed up more than a few legitimate uprisings of oppressed populations since the American revolution, starting with the failed French revolution of the 1790s. Masquerading as supporters of the oppressed, they infiltrate and then poison the effort at reform with a panoply of excesses usually involving wanton violence.
That’s what’s happening in America right now, people, thanks to the heirs of the centuries’ long ruling class campaign to crush the gains made over that time owing mostly to the successful American revolution. In this case, a newly-revived Russian oligarchic elite has deployed their government to advance their cause in an alliance with like-minded elites in the U.S. to cripple American democracy. It has found a malleable puppet in Trump who has gone overboard to take a wrecking ball to American democratic institutions, and they are helping him continue.
Anarchists stealing peaceful demonstrations from legitimately grieving protesters and turning them violent on one side are met by anarchist white racists on the other side, and chaos ensues leading a beleaguered population to abandon their legitimate causes, and a police state clampdown and suspension of democratic protections then occurs.
Almost no one today is properly reporting on what’s happening. Even the best of the media think it’s OK to use the shorthand terminology of “left” and “right” to explain the chaos that is happening, but that rendering is false.
Those authentically protesting racist police actions do not consider themselves “the left.” They are just American citizens demanding justice. It is only when radical anarchists jump in that the use of “left-right” language is made legitimate, and a fake but deadly battle is then waged based on that.
So, yes, America, the Russians are deeply involved in our 2020 presidential election, right now. They are actively using their spheres of influence on the fringes of our society on both sides of the civil war they are seeking to foment.
That is aimed at creating a level of chaos and conflict far in excess of what would otherwise happen, and this is what they intend that their tool, Trump, will capitalize on to spread fear and foment anger across the land.
This all happens as a fully-compromised Washington, gripped in blackmail that the revelations of Jerry Falwell Jr.’s kinky excesses are deemed to remind all what may come to them next. So, there is paralysis on the wholesale collapse of the economy and on an effective response to the covid-19 pandemic.
Yes, Russian intervention. Massive.
Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.
