"I'm Too Smart To Be Interfered With By The Russians"

"I'm Too Smart To Be Interfered With By The Russians"
Rant #5(Opinion)


Originally February 25, 2020



This week, news broke that the Russian GRU (its CIA-like agency) had been caught meddling in the Democratic primaries, promoting candidate Bernie Sanders while smearing the others in an attempt to ultimately have the Vermont Senator win the nomination. Meanwhile, their preference for having President Trump remain in office has not changed. It is likely that they believe Trump will have the least trouble defeating Bernie Sanders, and thus want to help him get to the general election. While they have deployed some enhanced technology this time, their tactics remain largely unchanged from their successful 2016 game plan. 

Some will deny any involvement by the Russians in our electoral discourse. Trump and his literalist base will defend his assertion that not only did the GRU not get involved in the 2016 election, but Ukraine and Hillary Clinton supporters framed Trump through the Russia accusations and Mueller probe to make him look bad. Others won't deny that the GRU engaged in "sweeping and systematic fashion" (in the words of Robert Mueller). However, the caveat for them is that it didn't really do anything: that a couple of shitposts and targeted ads did not single-handedly tilt an election. Perhaps some highly suggestible people may have fell for these tricks, but "I'm smart, and I know when somebody is trying to manipulate me, and I would not be moved by that--I'm too smart to be interfered with by the Russians."

Pretty much any Western intelligence agency, government, as well as independent companies and virtually any entity involved in the matter (other than Trump and Putin themselves) will acknowledge that the Russians meddled in 2016, did some minor meddlin' in 2018, and have already begun launching a full-scale campaign to tip the ballots this November. Failing that, their goal is to sew chaos among Americans and breed doubts around our most sacred institutions. How can they do this? 

The specific methods employed by the Russians in this ordeal will receive a thorough explanation in a later post. More broadly though, what people see, hear, read and watch influences what they think and feel, and people act (including vote) based on objective information, thoughts and emotions. People don't want to admit that ads, commercials, news and social media shape their perception of reality and heavily influence their lives, but they definitely do. All available research pretty much concludes that ads (in the traditional sense) work. Nobody knows the exact mechanism, but companies have shown time and time again that when they spend money on ads, people see/hear those ads, creating awareness of what they want consumers to buy, and then more people want to and do buy that thing. 

Everybody wants to believe that they analyze the world objectively and uniquely, operating autonomously in a sea of conformists--or, that all people think and act as completely separate entities. American egos have been nurtured so that everybody buys into the idea that they are a totally independent person--but they almost certainly are not, at least not anywhere close to the degree that they believe. If your knee-jerk reaction is "well that isn't me, I ain't a sucker!" Then it likely applies even more to you. Without recognizing the bevy of content in our midst vying for our intellectual digestion, an individual in these times will find themselves tugged and shoved in every direction without ever realizing that they have lifted a foot. 

Maleficent forces are stoking that "I ain't a sucker" sensation as a way to exploit such suckers. By feigning a sense of shared skepticism with the target--whether intentional or not--their guard will have slumped, allowing the opinion-peddler a better chance to transmit their message. For Russian operatives, this is to imbue distrust in some overall trustworthy institutions: news media in its entirety, elections, scientists, politicians. Not all of the people or groups that comprise those institutions are good; all are rife with ulterior motives and corruption here and there. Yet some forces prod these vulnerable, if not gullible, over-generalizing people into believing claims they read on a shitty website with zero legitimate sources is somehow more credible than the information expressed across dozens of news outlets by hundreds of individual journalists. 'You can't trust CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS, et al, but you can trust this fringe website, because we know too.' In a similar phenomenon, some now feel as though fringe Youtube videos by uncertified, unknown people speak more truth about vaccines than the tens of thousands of highly trained people who actually study, manufacture, dispense and administer them. 

Of course, numerous forms of manipulation a la Russia exist; remaining narrow in scope proves difficult. With micro-targeting, bad actors (e.g. the GRU) can pinpoint and deploy disturbingly specific messages in an attempt to sway one's opinion. Maybe it doesn't even outright have to do with "vote Trump, don't vote Democrat." That kind of simple, one-step attack does definitely work, but usually for people on the fence. The better strategy involves posts or messages with implications, causing the targets to infer a meaning; for example, they may see a series of posts and memes complaining that Mexican criminals rampantly sell drugs and rape White women. None of these various posts might explicitly decry an endorsement of Donald Trump. Sometimes, it will appear as though several different users have posted an array of comments or what have you, in reality all deriving from the same source; what looks like one of these users may say something pro-Trump, and the dialogue of what appears to be another user will feed into that idea. The possibilities and forms of this are endless, though these actions have some finite intended ends. By pushing or pulling any target to a conclusion, the individual has less of an idea that they have been manipulated. And yes, to an extent so much of our discourse and everyday conversations involve what a cynic could call manipulation. When it involves a foreign power trying to influence which candidate people choose to run the most powerful nation on earth, the stakes are significantly higher than a company trying to get you to try their brand of ketchup, or trying to shift an opinion as it relates to a individual. For the uninformed or undecided swing voter, simple ads showing a candidate and some of their policy could do the trick. When it comes to the more ideologically entrenched individuals, these offensives can take on an increasing complexity. 

Tons and tons of literature is available on how they've done this before and continue to do so now (that we, the public, know of). The fact that President Trump denies literally any involvement whatsoever by the Russians makes it difficult to even bring Americans to a consensus about the fact of the matter. Other than Trump and a few of his most hardcore cronies, most Republican politicians and media outlets as well as Democrats and others have acknowledged this problem. Bill Barr, the Attorney General of the United States and typically one of Trump's most loyal henchmen, just wrote an op-ed in USA Today with some other high-ranking colleagues that highlights this very real issue. We now know some more of the picture, but it will only get worse leading up to November. Having seen how easy it is and how laxly this administration approaches election security, other countries will probably hop in as well to pursue their own self-interests through the medium of our elections. And I fear that if Trump wins again, the public will never know the extent to which the Russians interfered this year. We might not find out about any type of foul play in 2020, at least not if it works in favor of Donald Trump. This president frequently projects his own inner strife: it is very plausible that in an effort to craft a counter-narrative refuting what his cronies did that Trump will blame totally innocent groups or countries. Actually, he already has; the accusations will probably just worsen. Doubts will persist regardless of who wins. But a Trump victory in 2020 would permanently damage the legitimacy of that office, our government and democracy itself, having had a peg removed in the Jenga stack that is America.