The debunked “Russian influence” nonsense is infantilizing liberals: The Russian money spent to influence the election was negligible. Its persistence as an explanation is bad for Dems

Let us stipulate that this is all true. It was also true in the 1950s that there really were a small number of communists in the US, including a few high-ranking government officials, who spied for the Soviet Union, as well as many more Soviet sympathizers. There were also genuine Soviet disinformation campaigns in the Cold War West. But only the lunatic fringe of the anticommunist right during the Cold War drew the conclusion that the president was a Soviet agent or that main- stream politicians were secret communists. In contrast, influential members of today’s American establishment, not only marginal conspiracy theorists, in order to absolve Hillary Clinton of blame for losing the 2016 election, have promoted the claim that the forty-fifth US president was installed by a foreign government and does its bidding. A Gallup poll in August 2018 showed that 78 percent of Democrats believed not only that Russia interfered in the election but also that it changed the outcome, denying Hillary Clinton the presidency.

t is not enough to demonstrate that Putin hoped that Hillary Clinton would be defeated. Great numbers of Americans hoped that she would be defeated as well. It is necessary therefore to demonstrate that the Internet activity of Russian trolls, rather than purely domestic opposition to her candidacy, was the decisive factor in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

In the context of election-year advertising, the quantity of Russian memes was negligible. According to Facebook, only 1 in 23,000 pieces of content on its platform could be traced to Russian sources. Facebook ads linked to Russia cost $46,000, or 0.05 percent of the $81 million that the Clinton and Trump campaigns themselves spent on Facebook ads.

ConservativeChick

Article URL : https://www.salon.com/2020/01/26/the-debunked-russian-influence-nonsense-is-infantilizing-liberals/