You’re probably as tired as I am of hearing about Russia’s meddling in the election. The Democrats told us the ballots couldn’t be hacked. They told us we must accept the results graciously. They told us nothing was threatening the integrity of our democratic process.
Then, they immediately reversed all of those positions once they didn’t like the outcome.
The State Department is fully investigating Russia’s impact on the election, and there is now irrefutable evidence that they did try to influence the election. It wasn’t through hacking or coercion. It was through legal advertising. And, through an interesting set of circumstances, it didn’t go the way anyone expected.
The Proof
You may have seen the headlines over the past week. Google has reported that Russian operates bought ads through YouTube, Gmail and Google search products. They spent tens of thousands of dollars on the campaign (the total was less than $100,000), and Google has turned their evidence over to the state department.
This is in addition to evidence provided by Facebook and Twitter claiming similar things. Microsoft is currently investigating to see if Bing was also caught in the mix. Combined, these Russian-backed ad campaigns could have totaled as much as $300,000. The left is celebrating. But they shouldn’t be.
Common Threads
There are a few things each of these campaigns had in common. First, they were all political. Second, they all focused on divisive issues. Gun control, abortion and immigration were the most frequent topics. In spite of this, very few ads actually supported a candidate. Instead they were designed to incite people tied to these topics. The other common thread is that these ads were run through admittedly left-leaning companies. This final fact caused something interesting to happen.
The Russian ads were not designed to get one candidate elected over another. They were designed to keep Americans angry and divided. There were ads that indirectly supported candidates on both sides, but because of the tech companies’ admitted bias, the bulk of pro-Trump ads were filtered and saw a smaller audience. The result is that Facebook, Twitter, Google and possibly a few other major tech companies inadvertently helped Russian operatives campaign on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
Before we get into the deeper politics of it all, we’ll cover a few more important points. The tech companies deliberately helped Clinton; they just didn’t intend to use Russian money to do it. Also, as shady as the whole situation is, the Russians only invested a few hundred thousand dollars into the campaigns. Trump and Clinton both spent hundreds of millions of dollars doing the same things, so the overall impact of the Russian effort was small.
Why the Meddling?
Now we have to ask why the Russians would meddle on behalf of both candidates. The answer is pretty simple: they didn’t like either one. For all of the back and forth between Putin and Trump during the election process, Putin never had any delusions that Trump had Russia’s best interests at heart.
Trump may have been more willing to renew positive relations between the U.S. and Russia, but in any conflict of interests he would always clearly choose America. Putin knew this from the start. Trump was not a much better choice for Russia, so they went with a different tactic. If they invested in divisiveness, then they could ensure that neither candidate would have the support of the American public when the elections were over.
This weakened the power of the president, regardless of who won, and to that end, the Russians were successful. A large swath of Americans are more interested in standing against Trump than standing for America.
This has undermined some of his international bargaining power, and Russia is mostly getting what they want. They have all but won in Syria and backlash around Crimea and Ukraine is minimal. Americans are distracted by domestic issues, and Russia is the clear benefactor.
While the left continues to cry wolf, they have dug in their heels on the one way the election really was threatened: illegal voting. They were eager to investigate Russian meddling because they thought it would favor their cause. They know without a doubt that illegal votes are mostly Democrat, and they won’t let that truth out if there is anything they can do to stop it.
On the right, we can enjoy the show. One by one, the states will eventually provide their voter information, and the left will likely lose millions of reliable, illegal votes in the process.
~ American Liberty Report
